The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Shelley, Also Known As Shirley" (Shelley Winters)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

There are so many great Shelley Winters stories (and this is only the first volume of her autobiography - there's another one that follows) but the following is my favorite. I can't even remember where I heard it -maybe from her. I've heard her speak a couple of times. She is exactly what you would imagine. A little bit crazy, insightful as hell, bawdy, funny, and you wish she would never stop talking. The story goes: Shelley Winters is in her 60s. She has already had a long and crazily successful career, but she is now getting old. An up-and-coming director is considering her for a role in a movie and he makes a beginner's mistake - he asks her to audition. You don't ask stars to audition. You have meetings with them, you do lunch, but you don't ask a star to come in and read sides, as though she is a beginner. It is assumed that Shelley Winters knows how to act. That is one of the perks of being a star! Now Shelley Winters was never a dummy or a diva - she liked to WORK (and her career shows that - she was working, and very well, right up to the end), but she did think, "Audition?? What are you, cracked?" She went to meet the director at his office. She was dressed in her normal attire: urban bag-lady with a big floppy hat. She carried an enormous bag over one shoulder. The director was a big fan of hers, "Oh, so excited you're coming to read, Miss Winters, thank you so much ..." Shelley Winters sat down, opened her bag, rummaged around in it for a bit, and pulled out one Oscar statue. Plopped it down on the desk. Then she reached into the bag again, rummaged around again, and pulled out a second Oscar statue. Plopped it down on the desk. Barked, "So. Do I still need to audition?"

Naturally, she got the part. Lessons learned all around. I just love that. At that point, who gives a fuck? She sure didn't. She made her point.

Shelley Winters' autobiography is not as relentlessly entertaining as Lana Turner's (excerpt here) but it's pretty damn close. She didn't have quite the tabloid frenzy surrounding her that Turner did, and much of her career was about, you know, ACTING, so her books have a different focus - but they are just as much fun to read. Shelley Winters gossips like crazy, tells stories, spares no one, and yet also comes across as generous and big-hearted. She always gives credit where credit is due. Even if it's to herself! Winters was an oddball, a kind of gangly big-boned girl with a funny-looking face that could look glamorous in certain lights, but that was not what she was known for. She was known for her blasted-open performances, she was known for her hard work and her disinterest in being liked. That is one of the great gifts of NOT being beautiful. She didn't have to worry so much about pleasing people, she didn't have that problem that so many beautiful people in the business have.

She went about her business, and got some pretty damn great parts, she worked hard, and also played hard. She slept with everyone. She sounds like a riot. If Lana Turner remembers every outfit she ever wore, then Shelley Winters remembers every meal she ever had. The books are full of food! From the tuna sandwiches she had as a kid, to the chocolate milk shakes she would share with her roommate, Marilyn Monroe ... Winters loved food! The books have a zest for life that really comes across. You know that she is telling you conversations word for word that probably never really went down that way ... but it doesn't matter. She's chatting with you, the reader, about what she remembers. Also, she's an entertainer. Like I said, she was no dummy. She knows how to tell a good tale.

David Thomson writes of her in his Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Blowsy, effusive, brash, and maternal, either voluptuous or drab, Shelley Winters is at her best when driven to wonder, "How did a girl like me get into a high-class movie like this?"

The highlights of her career are well-known. But the book is full of everything else, her commitment to the Actors Studio and working on her craft (which never stopped for her), her romances, her fuck buddies, her struggles to either be taken seriously or to NOT be taken seriously, her rehearsal process, how she worked, how she thought about script and character ... These are wonderful books. She's a terrific companion. Crazy, still proud of her triumphs, unafraid to be honest about herself, unafraid also to say, "You know what? I was terrific in that part", and funny as hell. Great anecdotal portraits of other people too - George Cukor, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, Marilyn Monroe - all of her colleagues and friends and co-workers ... she gives us generous portraits of all of them.

I have written before about the epiphany I had when I was 12 years old after seeing Dog Day Afternoon and East of Eden. Those movies led me on a research frenzy which brought me into contact, very early, with all of those Actors Studio afficianados - Carroll Baker, Paddy Chayefsky, Ben Gazzara, Michael Gazzo, the Strasbergs ... I would pore through the index pages of entertainment biographies looking for mention of James Dean, and that was how I started. I hadn't heard of any of those people at the time I was 12. But by the time I was 13, I felt like I knew them all personally. Shelley Winters' autobiographies were a big part of that journey. I read them both when I was 12, basically looking only for mention of James Dean and Marlon Brando but I got sucked into them in their own right. I had not seen Place in the Sun or Lolita, although I HAD seen Poseidon Adventure and it was amazing to me that that fat woman underwater was the cheesecake blonde in a bathing suit I saw in the photos of the book. But she was. Same person.

Since then, I've read both of the books multiple times. They're a lot of fun. I've actually lost the second volume in my various moves so I will have to rectify that!

You know, Montgomery Clift was apparently dismayed at her performance in Place in the Sun. He thought she was terrible, way too whiny. I think that might be the case of someone being too close to the work to really be able to see it. It is her whininess in Place in the Sun that helps elevate it to the dark American tragedy that it is. Not that anyone deserves to be murdered, but her character is so relentlessly whiny and needy that a strange thing happens to me, the viewer, as I watch that film: I start to want to get rid of her too. Even though she is an innocent, a victim of circumstance! NONE of it is her fault. You'd whine too if some guy knocked you up and refused to deal with it, instead spent his time at the house on the hill, hanging out with the hottie daughter who looks like Elizabeth Taylor! Shelley Winters fearlessly brings out the unpleasant nature of that character, simpering and hovering, with a scarf over her head, getting more and more upset and awful as the film goes on, as her situation deepens its desperation. This is not a woman used to sticking up for herself, this is not a woman who knows how to say, "Look, buddy, you had sex with me, I'm pregnant, deal with yourself!" Let us not forget that Shelley Winters herself, in real life, WAS the type of person who would say, "Listen, jagoff, I'm knocked up and you did it and you're involved whether you want to be or not." So she's ACTING here. This is not who she is. That character does not make open demands. Instead, she stares at him longingly, not saying a word, until he is driven mad by guilt and rage. She NEEDS to be that annoying in order for his actions to make sense. Yes, he is driven by his twisted version of the American dream, and she needs to be out of the way in order for him to ascend ... so there is THAT ... but also, her unpleasantness, her unlikeability, gives the film a startling uneasy tension. I always feel implicated myself when I watch it. Because I find myself thinking like HIM. I find myself thinking, "If only she could just disappear somehow ..." It's upsetting. I don't like MYSELF when I watch that movie, and that's really something. How often do movies do that?

Here is an excerpt from the first volume. Shelley Winters had had some success on the New York stage, and had done some movies. She was making her way. At some point, she was offered the role of Ado Annie in the long-running smash hit Oklahoma. She would be replacing the actress playing the part - always a kind of daunting experience. Winters was back in New York, getting ready to step into the role, and was spending her days studying at the Actors Studio. That's the excerpt I chose today.

Wonderful books. Wonderful actress.

EXCERPT FROM Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

The next morning I did have a slight hangover, and although I brushed my teeth five times, I could still taste the onions. I got to rehearsal fifteen minutes late because I couldn't get a cab in the rain. Very New York. I rushed past the St. James Theater doorman and onto the bare stage, tearing off my coat. I was running so fast I almost fell off the stage into the orchestra pit. The stage manager caught me; he was with an assistant stage manager and a rehearsal pianist under a work light. "Miss Winters, I presume," he said. "You're fifteen minutes late; that means you're docked three dollars. A dollar for every five minutes."

That was his opening line to me. Our relationship deteriorated for the next nine months, so you can imagine what his closing line was.

Still trying to establish some kind of rapport, I smiled and said, "That's all right. I'll be making five hundred dollars a week in this show. But from now on I'll be on time."

When I said $500 a week, his face got chalky. He grabbed my arm and whispered tensely, "Don't you tell anyone else in the cast that. Lawrence Langner must have lost his mind."

I pulled my arm away, rubbed it and said, "Listen, Mr. Simon Legree, this show has been running for almost five years. Maybe I'll give it a shot in the arm if you don't break my arm first."

He replied, "Unfortunately you have a run-of-the-play contract, and the understudy who did just beautifully for the past eight weeks is back in the chorus. I'll be damned if I know why they needed you."

"Charming. Would you like to cut my throat now or later?"

Then started the most peculiar rehearsal I've ever had in my life, before or since. The stage manager held the script and read each line as he wanted me to read it - exactly as Celeste Holm had done it nearly five years ago. I was supposed to imitate him imitating her. Whenever he read my cue, I forgot my line because I have this strange habit of having language come out of my mouth as a result of thought. I had been trained by the New Theater School and George Cukor to perform this way, even in a musical comedy: The funniest comedy is when the timing is realistic and natural.

I tried, I really tried. The chalk marks which indicated the sets confused me, and when we got to the songs, the same thing happened. I knew the lyrics backward and forward, but my efforts to mimic him would make me forget them. The rehearsals were a struggle to the death. I thought I would go crazy. So did he.

I called Equity to find out if this was the way new actors were put into established roles, but Equity said, "We can't make artistic decisions for the producers." But what Equity did do for me was to inform the Theater Guild office that I was allowed to rehearse only four hours a day and not at all on matinee days. Happily this schedule allowed me to attend the Actors' Studio almost immediately.

Soon the other understudies began to rehearse with me, thank God. I saw the show every night, and although the music and dancing were wonderful, there was a peculiar robot quality to the acting. I was to find out later that when actors stay in a show as long as five years, eight performances a week, the only way they can survive is to develop a technique whereby they literally turn off their minds at eight-thirty and don't wake up again until eleven-fifteen. All the performances are done by rote, and they don't have to even think about what they are saying or doing. Their brains just take a rest.

When we finally got to the dress rehearsal with the full cast, I really tried to imitate Celeste Holm, but I could no more do it than I could fly without an airplane. Langner and Theresa Helburn and Rodgers and Hammerstein watched my miserable strained rehearsal. It really was terrible. Langner asked me afterward what had happened to that performance I had given at the audition, so I told him the truth. "Mr. Langner, I can't imitate another actress. I don't know how. I have to give it my own interpretation and try to stick as close to the character as the author intended. I want this job, but I just can't do it if I have to imitate someone else."

The producers and writers had an artistic huddle, and then Langner said, in front of the whole cast, the chorus, the ballet and the stage manager, "For the last year the show has been looking very tired. The word of mouth has not been good, and business has been falling off. We have a huge company and thirty stagehands, and we need a great deal of publicity to keep the show alive. That's why we brought Shelley all the way from Hollywood, to try to pep things up. So tomorrow, Shelley, when you go into the show, you do it your way. I'm going to give you another rehearsal with the orchestra, and then I'll take another rehearsal of the scenes you're involved in. And at tomorrow's matinee I want you all to wake up and pay close attention and answer Shelley's line readings because they will be different from what you're used to. And unless you really talk to her, it will throw off your timing." After two weeks of hellish rehearsals, I wanted to hug and kiss him right there in front of everybody.

Then I put everything else out of my mind, and for the next hour I had a wonderful rehearsal with the beautiful music of Oklahoma!, and I sang "I Cain't Say No" in such a funny way that the rest of the cast started to laugh. I think they began to enjoy re-creating their roles, too, because I was different from the girls who had played it during the past five years. Everybody on the stage was enjoying himself.

Rodgers and Hammerstein took me to Sardi's for dinner. Whenever Hammerstein went to the phone or the men's room, Rodgers would tell me that the remarkable thing about Oklahoma! was its music and that I must sing out and be sure the audience heard the lovely melodies. I must sing as loudly as I could. Of course, I agreed. When Rodgers went to the phone, Oscar Hammerstein impressed on me how brilliant the lyrics were and that I must enunciate carefully so that the audience could understand all the funny lines or the show wouldn't work. Never mind trying to sing too much, because the orchestra was playing the melodies anyway. Of course, I agreed with him too.

I went home to my little apartment hotel, confused and tremulous, and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. How could I satisfy everybody? Then I remembered what Charles Feldman had whispered in my ear as I was leaving Universal a week before, "When you've got a good director, do as exactly as he says." Lawrence Langner had been a fine director and had created the Theatre Guild and made it the most distinguished theatre company in America. And he had directed me to do it my way. I went to sleep content, resolved to obey my director, who in this case was my producer.

The next day I opened in the matinee. The house was packed with high school kids, probably a benefit or on twofers. Agnes de Mille, the show's choreographer, came into my dressing room before the "half hour" and handed me a bouquet of toy oil wells, which, she said, was the state flower of Oklahoma. This made me laugh, and I stopped being so nervous.

The orchestra struck up the overture, a medley of music which by then was adored throughout the world. I made my entrance in a farmyard scene, bumping into a fence which had not been on the chalk marks that the stage manager had drawn on the bare stage at rehearsal. I kicked the fence and said, "Now, who jest put that darned thing there? It weren't there last night when we was spoonin'." And since this was in character for Ado Annie, the audience screamed with laughter. So did the orchestra and the rest of the cast. I was so encouraged by their laughter that I found every comic nuance I could for my "little hot-pants Ado Annie". The show ran five minutes overtime because of the extra laughs.

As I left the stage, I was flying high, exhilarated with the joy of being in front of a live Broadway audience again who obviously loved and enjoyed me. The stage manager was waiting for me. "Listen, you Method actor," he said, using the word as if it were the worst curse word in the language, "we only want laughs where they've been established. And on matinees the curtain is supposed to come down at five-fifteen, not five-twenty. Or else I have to pay the crew overtime."

The producers and Rodgers and Hammerstein came rushing backstage into my dressing room, saying things like: "Shelley, this is the best show we've had since opening night. The audience is milling around the lobby, buying programs and the records."

And Langner said, "The way you did it today, do it every show, and we'll be back doing capacity business in no time." The stage manager slunk out of the dressing room. They all took me to dinner at Sardi's, but I didn't eat much or drink anything, I was so high and happy. I knew I had another performance in a little while, and I wanted to rest and be fresh.

The Cold War was on in Europe, but it was nothing compared to the Cold War that was going on backstage at the St. James Theater. This went on for the nine months I was in the show. Even so, I came to love Oklahoma! with its beautiful music and ballet. I would stand in the wings opposite the stage manager and watch the show over and over again, especially Agnes de Mille's ballets.

The Books: "Shelley, Also Known As Shirley" (Shelley Winters)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

There are so many great Shelley Winters stories (and this is only the first volume of her autobiography - there's another one that follows) but the following is my favorite. I can't even remember where I heard it -maybe from her. I've heard her speak a couple of times. She is exactly what you would imagine. A little bit crazy, insightful as hell, bawdy, funny, and you wish she would never stop talking. The story goes: Shelley Winters is in her 60s. She has already had a long and crazily successful career, but she is now getting old. An up-and-coming director is considering her for a role in a movie and he makes a beginner's mistake - he asks her to audition. You don't ask stars to audition. You have meetings with them, you do lunch, but you don't ask a star to come in and read sides, as though she is a beginner. It is assumed that Shelley Winters knows how to act. That is one of the perks of being a star! Now Shelley Winters was never a dummy or a diva - she liked to WORK (and her career shows that - she was working, and very well, right up to the end), but she did think, "Audition?? What are you, cracked?" She went to meet the director at his office. She was dressed in her normal attire: urban bag-lady with a big floppy hat. She carried an enormous bag over one shoulder. The director was a big fan of hers, "Oh, so excited you're coming to read, Miss Winters, thank you so much ..." Shelley Winters sat down, opened her bag, rummaged around in it for a bit, and pulled out one Oscar statue. Plopped it down on the desk. Then she reached into the bag again, rummaged around again, and pulled out a second Oscar statue. Plopped it down on the desk. Barked, "So. Do I still need to audition?"

Naturally, she got the part. Lessons learned all around. I just love that. At that point, who gives a fuck? She sure didn't. She made her point.

Shelley Winters' autobiography is not as relentlessly entertaining as Lana Turner's (excerpt here) but it's pretty damn close. She didn't have quite the tabloid frenzy surrounding her that Turner did, and much of her career was about, you know, ACTING, so her books have a different focus - but they are just as much fun to read. Shelley Winters gossips like crazy, tells stories, spares no one, and yet also comes across as generous and big-hearted. She always gives credit where credit is due. Even if it's to herself! Winters was an oddball, a kind of gangly big-boned girl with a funny-looking face that could look glamorous in certain lights, but that was not what she was known for. She was known for her blasted-open performances, she was known for her hard work and her disinterest in being liked. That is one of the great gifts of NOT being beautiful. She didn't have to worry so much about pleasing people, she didn't have that problem that so many beautiful people in the business have.

She went about her business, and got some pretty damn great parts, she worked hard, and also played hard. She slept with everyone. She sounds like a riot. If Lana Turner remembers every outfit she ever wore, then Shelley Winters remembers every meal she ever had. The books are full of food! From the tuna sandwiches she had as a kid, to the chocolate milk shakes she would share with her roommate, Marilyn Monroe ... Winters loved food! The books have a zest for life that really comes across. You know that she is telling you conversations word for word that probably never really went down that way ... but it doesn't matter. She's chatting with you, the reader, about what she remembers. Also, she's an entertainer. Like I said, she was no dummy. She knows how to tell a good tale.

David Thomson writes of her in his Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Blowsy, effusive, brash, and maternal, either voluptuous or drab, Shelley Winters is at her best when driven to wonder, "How did a girl like me get into a high-class movie like this?"

The highlights of her career are well-known. But the book is full of everything else, her commitment to the Actors Studio and working on her craft (which never stopped for her), her romances, her fuck buddies, her struggles to either be taken seriously or to NOT be taken seriously, her rehearsal process, how she worked, how she thought about script and character ... These are wonderful books. She's a terrific companion. Crazy, still proud of her triumphs, unafraid to be honest about herself, unafraid also to say, "You know what? I was terrific in that part", and funny as hell. Great anecdotal portraits of other people too - George Cukor, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, Marilyn Monroe - all of her colleagues and friends and co-workers ... she gives us generous portraits of all of them.

I have written before about the epiphany I had when I was 12 years old after seeing Dog Day Afternoon and East of Eden. Those movies led me on a research frenzy which brought me into contact, very early, with all of those Actors Studio afficianados - Carroll Baker, Paddy Chayefsky, Ben Gazzara, Michael Gazzo, the Strasbergs ... I would pore through the index pages of entertainment biographies looking for mention of James Dean, and that was how I started. I hadn't heard of any of those people at the time I was 12. But by the time I was 13, I felt like I knew them all personally. Shelley Winters' autobiographies were a big part of that journey. I read them both when I was 12, basically looking only for mention of James Dean and Marlon Brando but I got sucked into them in their own right. I had not seen Place in the Sun or Lolita, although I HAD seen Poseidon Adventure and it was amazing to me that that fat woman underwater was the cheesecake blonde in a bathing suit I saw in the photos of the book. But she was. Same person.

Since then, I've read both of the books multiple times. They're a lot of fun. I've actually lost the second volume in my various moves so I will have to rectify that!

You know, Montgomery Clift was apparently dismayed at her performance in Place in the Sun. He thought she was terrible, way too whiny. I think that might be the case of someone being too close to the work to really be able to see it. It is her whininess in Place in the Sun that helps elevate it to the dark American tragedy that it is. Not that anyone deserves to be murdered, but her character is so relentlessly whiny and needy that a strange thing happens to me, the viewer, as I watch that film: I start to want to get rid of her too. Even though she is an innocent, a victim of circumstance! NONE of it is her fault. You'd whine too if some guy knocked you up and refused to deal with it, instead spent his time at the house on the hill, hanging out with the hottie daughter who looks like Elizabeth Taylor! Shelley Winters fearlessly brings out the unpleasant nature of that character, simpering and hovering, with a scarf over her head, getting more and more upset and awful as the film goes on, as her situation deepens its desperation. This is not a woman used to sticking up for herself, this is not a woman who knows how to say, "Look, buddy, you had sex with me, I'm pregnant, deal with yourself!" Let us not forget that Shelley Winters herself, in real life, WAS the type of person who would say, "Listen, jagoff, I'm knocked up and you did it and you're involved whether you want to be or not." So she's ACTING here. This is not who she is. That character does not make open demands. Instead, she stares at him longingly, not saying a word, until he is driven mad by guilt and rage. She NEEDS to be that annoying in order for his actions to make sense. Yes, he is driven by his twisted version of the American dream, and she needs to be out of the way in order for him to ascend ... so there is THAT ... but also, her unpleasantness, her unlikeability, gives the film a startling uneasy tension. I always feel implicated myself when I watch it. Because I find myself thinking like HIM. I find myself thinking, "If only she could just disappear somehow ..." It's upsetting. I don't like MYSELF when I watch that movie, and that's really something. How often do movies do that?

Here is an excerpt from the first volume. Shelley Winters had had some success on the New York stage, and had done some movies. She was making her way. At some point, she was offered the role of Ado Annie in the long-running smash hit Oklahoma. She would be replacing the actress playing the part - always a kind of daunting experience. Winters was back in New York, getting ready to step into the role, and was spending her days studying at the Actors Studio. That's the excerpt I chose today.

Wonderful books. Wonderful actress.

EXCERPT FROM Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

The next morning I did have a slight hangover, and although I brushed my teeth five times, I could still taste the onions. I got to rehearsal fifteen minutes late because I couldn't get a cab in the rain. Very New York. I rushed past the St. James Theater doorman and onto the bare stage, tearing off my coat. I was running so fast I almost fell off the stage into the orchestra pit. The stage manager caught me; he was with an assistant stage manager and a rehearsal pianist under a work light. "Miss Winters, I presume," he said. "You're fifteen minutes late; that means you're docked three dollars. A dollar for every five minutes."

That was his opening line to me. Our relationship deteriorated for the next nine months, so you can imagine what his closing line was.

Still trying to establish some kind of rapport, I smiled and said, "That's all right. I'll be making five hundred dollars a week in this show. But from now on I'll be on time."

When I said $500 a week, his face got chalky. He grabbed my arm and whispered tensely, "Don't you tell anyone else in the cast that. Lawrence Langner must have lost his mind."

I pulled my arm away, rubbed it and said, "Listen, Mr. Simon Legree, this show has been running for almost five years. Maybe I'll give it a shot in the arm if you don't break my arm first."

He replied, "Unfortunately you have a run-of-the-play contract, and the understudy who did just beautifully for the past eight weeks is back in the chorus. I'll be damned if I know why they needed you."

"Charming. Would you like to cut my throat now or later?"

Then started the most peculiar rehearsal I've ever had in my life, before or since. The stage manager held the script and read each line as he wanted me to read it - exactly as Celeste Holm had done it nearly five years ago. I was supposed to imitate him imitating her. Whenever he read my cue, I forgot my line because I have this strange habit of having language come out of my mouth as a result of thought. I had been trained by the New Theater School and George Cukor to perform this way, even in a musical comedy: The funniest comedy is when the timing is realistic and natural.

I tried, I really tried. The chalk marks which indicated the sets confused me, and when we got to the songs, the same thing happened. I knew the lyrics backward and forward, but my efforts to mimic him would make me forget them. The rehearsals were a struggle to the death. I thought I would go crazy. So did he.

I called Equity to find out if this was the way new actors were put into established roles, but Equity said, "We can't make artistic decisions for the producers." But what Equity did do for me was to inform the Theater Guild office that I was allowed to rehearse only four hours a day and not at all on matinee days. Happily this schedule allowed me to attend the Actors' Studio almost immediately.

Soon the other understudies began to rehearse with me, thank God. I saw the show every night, and although the music and dancing were wonderful, there was a peculiar robot quality to the acting. I was to find out later that when actors stay in a show as long as five years, eight performances a week, the only way they can survive is to develop a technique whereby they literally turn off their minds at eight-thirty and don't wake up again until eleven-fifteen. All the performances are done by rote, and they don't have to even think about what they are saying or doing. Their brains just take a rest.

When we finally got to the dress rehearsal with the full cast, I really tried to imitate Celeste Holm, but I could no more do it than I could fly without an airplane. Langner and Theresa Helburn and Rodgers and Hammerstein watched my miserable strained rehearsal. It really was terrible. Langner asked me afterward what had happened to that performance I had given at the audition, so I told him the truth. "Mr. Langner, I can't imitate another actress. I don't know how. I have to give it my own interpretation and try to stick as close to the character as the author intended. I want this job, but I just can't do it if I have to imitate someone else."

The producers and writers had an artistic huddle, and then Langner said, in front of the whole cast, the chorus, the ballet and the stage manager, "For the last year the show has been looking very tired. The word of mouth has not been good, and business has been falling off. We have a huge company and thirty stagehands, and we need a great deal of publicity to keep the show alive. That's why we brought Shelley all the way from Hollywood, to try to pep things up. So tomorrow, Shelley, when you go into the show, you do it your way. I'm going to give you another rehearsal with the orchestra, and then I'll take another rehearsal of the scenes you're involved in. And at tomorrow's matinee I want you all to wake up and pay close attention and answer Shelley's line readings because they will be different from what you're used to. And unless you really talk to her, it will throw off your timing." After two weeks of hellish rehearsals, I wanted to hug and kiss him right there in front of everybody.

Then I put everything else out of my mind, and for the next hour I had a wonderful rehearsal with the beautiful music of Oklahoma!, and I sang "I Cain't Say No" in such a funny way that the rest of the cast started to laugh. I think they began to enjoy re-creating their roles, too, because I was different from the girls who had played it during the past five years. Everybody on the stage was enjoying himself.

Rodgers and Hammerstein took me to Sardi's for dinner. Whenever Hammerstein went to the phone or the men's room, Rodgers would tell me that the remarkable thing about Oklahoma! was its music and that I must sing out and be sure the audience heard the lovely melodies. I must sing as loudly as I could. Of course, I agreed. When Rodgers went to the phone, Oscar Hammerstein impressed on me how brilliant the lyrics were and that I must enunciate carefully so that the audience could understand all the funny lines or the show wouldn't work. Never mind trying to sing too much, because the orchestra was playing the melodies anyway. Of course, I agreed with him too.

I went home to my little apartment hotel, confused and tremulous, and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. How could I satisfy everybody? Then I remembered what Charles Feldman had whispered in my ear as I was leaving Universal a week before, "When you've got a good director, do as exactly as he says." Lawrence Langner had been a fine director and had created the Theatre Guild and made it the most distinguished theatre company in America. And he had directed me to do it my way. I went to sleep content, resolved to obey my director, who in this case was my producer.

The next day I opened in the matinee. The house was packed with high school kids, probably a benefit or on twofers. Agnes de Mille, the show's choreographer, came into my dressing room before the "half hour" and handed me a bouquet of toy oil wells, which, she said, was the state flower of Oklahoma. This made me laugh, and I stopped being so nervous.

The orchestra struck up the overture, a medley of music which by then was adored throughout the world. I made my entrance in a farmyard scene, bumping into a fence which had not been on the chalk marks that the stage manager had drawn on the bare stage at rehearsal. I kicked the fence and said, "Now, who jest put that darned thing there? It weren't there last night when we was spoonin'." And since this was in character for Ado Annie, the audience screamed with laughter. So did the orchestra and the rest of the cast. I was so encouraged by their laughter that I found every comic nuance I could for my "little hot-pants Ado Annie". The show ran five minutes overtime because of the extra laughs.

As I left the stage, I was flying high, exhilarated with the joy of being in front of a live Broadway audience again who obviously loved and enjoyed me. The stage manager was waiting for me. "Listen, you Method actor," he said, using the word as if it were the worst curse word in the language, "we only want laughs where they've been established. And on matinees the curtain is supposed to come down at five-fifteen, not five-twenty. Or else I have to pay the crew overtime."

The producers and Rodgers and Hammerstein came rushing backstage into my dressing room, saying things like: "Shelley, this is the best show we've had since opening night. The audience is milling around the lobby, buying programs and the records."

And Langner said, "The way you did it today, do it every show, and we'll be back doing capacity business in no time." The stage manager slunk out of the dressing room. They all took me to dinner at Sardi's, but I didn't eat much or drink anything, I was so high and happy. I knew I had another performance in a little while, and I wanted to rest and be fresh.

The Cold War was on in Europe, but it was nothing compared to the Cold War that was going on backstage at the St. James Theater. This went on for the nine months I was in the show. Even so, I came to love Oklahoma! with its beautiful music and ballet. I would stand in the wings opposite the stage manager and watch the show over and over again, especially Agnes de Mille's ballets.

The Books: "Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art" (Gene Wilder)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

There's a magic about Gene Wilder. It is hard to describe or pin down, and maybe that's the biggest part of the magic: it can't really be expressed. He came and talked at my school and the man is truly riveting in person, but it's odd the impression he has: he gets laughs where you can't believe there's a laugh. Or he would say something serious, deeply serious, in such an amusing way that we would all burst into laughter - and he said at one point, "This always happens to me. I wasn't trying to be funny right there!" He's funniest when he is most serious. If you think about his best parts - it's not a manic funny energy that he has - it is a desperately serious energy, and when he's in a movie that is worthy of him, like The Producers or Young Frankenstein or all the movies he did with Richard Pryor ... it's pretty near genius. Because not once do you think that what this guy is going through is not serious and real to him. It is so so funny, and yet - the character may as well be in King Lear, that's how high the stakes are.

His book has a little bit too much therapy in it for my taste - and you can tell from the title the sort of book it will be ... but in terms of the choice anecdotes, the moments that make up a good career - he has no equal. For instance, my favorite, when he was basically accosted by Cary Grant:

Silver Streak was a big hit and was chosen as the Royal Performance for the queen of England and the royal family. I couldn't go to London because I was filming The World's Greatest Love at the time, but a month later, when Prince Charles came to visit 20th-Century Fox, I was invited to attend a luncheon in his honor, to be held in the Fox commissary.

As I was walking along the small street that leads from the office buildings to the commissary, a taxi pulled up and I heard someone shouting, "Oh, Mr. Wilder! ... Mr. Wilder!" I turned and saw Cary Grant stepping out of the taxi. My heart started pounding a little faster, but I didn't throw up this time, as I did when I met Simone Signoret. Cary Grant walked up to me, and after we shook hands, he said, "I was sailing on the QEII to England with my daughter, and on the second day out she said, 'Dad-dy, I want to see the Silver Streak -- they're showing it in the Entertainment Room.' And I said, 'No, darling, I don't go to movies in public.' And she said, 'Dad-dy, Dad-dy, please - I want to see the Silver Streak.' So I took her to see your film. And then we saw it again the next day, and the next. Tell me something, will you?"

"Of course."

"Was your film in any way inspired by North by Northwest?"

"Absolutely! Collin Higgins, who wrote the film, loved North by Northwest. It was one of his favorites. I think he was trying to do his version of it."

"I thought so," Mr. Grant said. "It never fails! You take an ordinary chap like you or me ... (An ordinary chap like you or me? Didn't he ever see a Cary Grant movie?) ... put him in trouble way over his head, and then watch him try to squirm out of it. Never fails!"

That makes me LAUGH. Cary Grant comparing himself to Gene Wilder - as though they would ever be cast in the same roles. An ordinary chap!! Beautiful!

I think, too, that there is a deep and lonely sadness about Gene Wilder, which sets him apart from most other mainly comic actors. And again, when he is allowed to tap into that in his roles - even if it comes out in a funny way - it's marvelous. He's one of my all-time favorites. I basically just love him.

He was dominated by his mother as a child, and he never felt he could express anger. Ever. (Like I mentioned: lots of therapy in the book.) But what he could do was make his mother laugh. It became his entire reason for living. Interestingly enough, he started out in New York studying at the Actors Studio, with so many others ... and he started to get bit parts in shows, where he always made some kind of impression. I mean, honestly, is there any one like Gene Wilder? I guess you could say he is a "type" but the personality beneath the type is 100% original. He got noticed.

Arthur Penn, a bigwig at the Actors Studio, was filming Bonnie and Clyde and he asked Wilder to do the small (but my God memorable) part of the undertaker who is kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde, et al. To me, that scene still packs a punch. Isn't he awesome? It was his first movie.

Wilder talks about his experience on Bonnie and Clyde in the book. One of the things I really love about the book is how he lingers on what I would call his "A-ha Moments", when he started to understand the craft, and how to do it ... and it all started mixing together in a big pot in his subconscious. Here is him on Bonnie and Clyde:

My first scene began with Evan and me sitting in the back of her car, supposedly chasing the Barrow Gang. I waited for Arthur Penn to call "Action". Arthur was sitting alongside the camera - out of frame, of course - but not more than five or six feet away from me. As soon as I heard him say, "Action," I started to act. Sounds sensible, doesn't it? But Arthur immediately called out to the camera operator, "Keep rolling," and then he gave me my first revelation of what it means to be an "actor's director". While the camera was rolling, he said, "Gene, just because I say 'Action', doesn't mean you have to start acting - it just means that we're ready. I could see you had something cooking inside, but you weren't ready to act yet. Film is cheap. Keep working on whatever you're working on and start acting when you're ready."

The scene went very well.

When we took a break, the assistant director came up to me and said, "Don't get used to what just happened - you're not going to find many directors who work like Arthur."

Oh, and speaking of "A-ha Moments" - when Gene Wilder spoke at my school he told the following story about his response to seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Circus. You could almost say that Gene Wilder got the revelation for his entire career from watching what Chaplin did in that part:

I saw Charlie Chaplin in The Circus at a Chaplin film festival in New York.

Charlie has just gotten out of prison (one assumes) and is starving. He wanders onto the circus grounds and sees a father carrying his baby over one shoulder. The baby is holding a huge hot dog. The father - whose back is to Charlie - is talking to the man selling the hot dogs. The father looks back at Charlie once or twice.

Charlie makes the sweetest faces at the little boy, and - just when the father isn't looking - he takes a big bite out of the baby's hot dog. The father turns quickly to Charlie, who immediately stops chewing and makes sweet faces at the baby. When the father turns back to the hot dog salesman, Charlie takes another bite of the hot dog. The father turns around again, suspecting something fishy. Charlie stops chewing and makes wonderful googley faces at the baby.

The acting lesson from this film seems so simple, yet it inspired me for the rest of my career. If the thing you're doing is really funny, you don't need to "act funny" while doing it.

Wonderful stuff. Gene Wilder followed up Bonnie and Clyde with a project he had been working on for a long time with his insane friend Mel Brooks. Originally it was called Springtime for Hitler which, of course, became The Producers.

The Producers put Gene Wilder (and pretty much everyone involved) on the map. Wilder was nominated for an Oscar. It was an insane year for him. He became a giant and important star, and from then on was pretty much a huge playah. You list out some of his movies and you just shake your head, thankfully, that there were people around who knew how to utilize this talent. Thank God. If it were now, would it have happened? The material for wacko people like Wilder is just not as good. Who knows. Mel Brooks obviously was a big part of the whole story, and it's a collaboration that really stands alone. Look at what they did together!

But Wilder was not dependent on just one director after The Producers. He was a commodity. Everyone wanted him. Woody Allen cast him (hilariously) as the dude who falls in love (for realz, yo) with a sheep in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ... and Wilder, in the book, is so funny about how he made that real for himself. He used his Actors Studio training, and would sit with the sheep, off-camera, staring into her (actually, I think the real sheep was a he) eyes - and finding the beauty there. It's hysterical. He goes into great detail in his book about the look of that sheep's eyelashes, and how - once he really started studying her (him), he saw that those eyes were actually sexy. I am laughing out loud as I type this. But see, that's what sets Wilder apart. He works on these ridiculously comedic parts with a seriousness that serves him. Yes, the result is so so funny ... but for him the "way in" was always through the reality of the moment.

I mean, think about his total FREAK OUT in that first scene of The Producers when he's running around Zero Mostel's office jibbering like a lunatic. That is REAL. That is not just a guy being all antic and high-energy ... It is highly specific. He is not giving us a lot of bluster and sound and fury trying to INDICATE panic ... he really IS panicked. Funniest scene ever.

His collaboration with Brooks gave us some of his most memorable parts - but in the 70s he hooked up with an unlikely partner, Richard Pryer, to make a movie called Silver Streak (which I love so much I can't even tell you). And a new partnership was born. Who would have thought that those two would have such chemistry? It's amazing to watch. I've seen all their movies - I think they made four of them altogether - and it's a friendship captured onscreen, it's like you're watching something real - like watching To Have and Have Not and knowing that Bogie and Bacall were falling in love during the filming of that movie. Watching Silver Streak is to see the birth of that friendship. One of the best movie friendships captured in history.

You just LOVE to see them together. Partly because it's so bizarre and you wouldn't expect it. Pryor seems like such a solitary guy, and Wilder seems so almost surreal ... but together? Manic hilarity. Pryor was so quick, too - he needed a co-star who could keep up. Wilder could MORE than keep up. Most of those films were improvised, and seriously - I still watch some of them now and tears of laughter stream down my face. LOVE THEM.

Gene Wilder's book is rather touchy-feely, but if you can wade through that and get to his series of "A ha moments" about acting, it is well worth it. He's really an original. His career is unlike most other people's and although he seems to have pretty much retired from movies, he is still very active in the theatre, directing, adapting, etc.

I think one of the things that I get about Gene Wilder that a lot of movie stars don't have is that people really love him. Perhaps it's just because he was a widower so young and that generated sympathy for him but I don't think that's it. I think there is something about him in The Producers, and Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and all the rest that people just flat-out love. Big romantic leading men are awesome, too, but sometimes they have a short shelf-life. Gene Wilder's shelf-life is long, long, long, and it's because of that warmth that he brings up in people. You can see it when you bring his name up.

The excerpt I wanted to choose today is kind of famous. Gene Wilder has told it often, and other people who were there have also told the story. I post it here because it's a great story.

It illuminates, for me, what I think of as Gene Wilder's genius. Not everyone is a genius, and I've said it before - I think there are very few genius actors. I think there are a lot of actors with great skill and talent ... but geniuses don't come along that often. I think Gene Wilder is a genius. Not just because of what he is able to do while acting onscreen, although that is a part of it - but because of how he approaches things, how he looks at things, and how he sees things.

He was offered the role of Willy Wonka, and he thought about it, and came up with an idea, a thought, an image ... he didn't go any further than that, but he certainly knew where he wanted to start. It's not in the book. It came from Wilder's own imagination and it's brilliant. It MAKES the movie, in my opinion, and for exactly the reasons Wilder describes. Notice, too, how the director filmed - shot for shot - what Wilder said.

EXCERPT FROM Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

Although I liked Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn't sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

"What's bothering you?"

"When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself ... but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause."

" ... Why do you want to do that?"

"Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."

Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn't quite sure about this change.

"You mean - if you can't do what you just said, you won't do the part?"

"That's right," I answered.

Mel mumbled to himself, " ... comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "Okay!"

When I got to Munich - where the filming had already begun - Mr. Stuart showed me the entranceway to "Wonka's Chocolate Factory." I had practiced my forward somersault on a gym mat for three weeks before coming to Munich. The Scenic Department had made three Styrofoam bricks that looked just like cobblestones, which they laid into my entrance walk. That way I wouldn't have to hit the exact same brick with my pointed cane every time we did the scene. On the day they filmed my entrance, I did the scene four times, in just the way that we had planned. Then Mr. Stuart asked me to do just one without the cane. I took a deep breath, swallowed my better instincts, and did the scene without the cane. The next day, David Wolper - the head of the studio - watched the rushes of my entrance. As I was coming out of the commissary after finishing my lunch, Mel Stuart ran up to me.

"He loved it! David loved it!"

"What if he hadn't loved it?" I asked.

"Well, I would have used that take without the cane."

It's not that David Wolper doesn't have good artistic judgment - he does, and he loved what he saw. But if it had been Joe Levine who was bankrolling the film, I think he probably would have said, "What the hell's that guy doing with a cane? Where the fuck does it say that Willy What's-His-Name is a cripple?" I understood better why artistic control is so important to directors.

The Books: "Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art" (Gene Wilder)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

There's a magic about Gene Wilder. It is hard to describe or pin down, and maybe that's the biggest part of the magic: it can't really be expressed. He came and talked at my school and the man is truly riveting in person, but it's odd the impression he has: he gets laughs where you can't believe there's a laugh. Or he would say something serious, deeply serious, in such an amusing way that we would all burst into laughter - and he said at one point, "This always happens to me. I wasn't trying to be funny right there!" He's funniest when he is most serious. If you think about his best parts - it's not a manic funny energy that he has - it is a desperately serious energy, and when he's in a movie that is worthy of him, like The Producers or Young Frankenstein or all the movies he did with Richard Pryor ... it's pretty near genius. Because not once do you think that what this guy is going through is not serious and real to him. It is so so funny, and yet - the character may as well be in King Lear, that's how high the stakes are.

His book has a little bit too much therapy in it for my taste - and you can tell from the title the sort of book it will be ... but in terms of the choice anecdotes, the moments that make up a good career - he has no equal. For instance, my favorite, when he was basically accosted by Cary Grant:

Silver Streak was a big hit and was chosen as the Royal Performance for the queen of England and the royal family. I couldn't go to London because I was filming The World's Greatest Love at the time, but a month later, when Prince Charles came to visit 20th-Century Fox, I was invited to attend a luncheon in his honor, to be held in the Fox commissary.

As I was walking along the small street that leads from the office buildings to the commissary, a taxi pulled up and I heard someone shouting, "Oh, Mr. Wilder! ... Mr. Wilder!" I turned and saw Cary Grant stepping out of the taxi. My heart started pounding a little faster, but I didn't throw up this time, as I did when I met Simone Signoret. Cary Grant walked up to me, and after we shook hands, he said, "I was sailing on the QEII to England with my daughter, and on the second day out she said, 'Dad-dy, I want to see the Silver Streak -- they're showing it in the Entertainment Room.' And I said, 'No, darling, I don't go to movies in public.' And she said, 'Dad-dy, Dad-dy, please - I want to see the Silver Streak.' So I took her to see your film. And then we saw it again the next day, and the next. Tell me something, will you?"

"Of course."

"Was your film in any way inspired by North by Northwest?"

"Absolutely! Collin Higgins, who wrote the film, loved North by Northwest. It was one of his favorites. I think he was trying to do his version of it."

"I thought so," Mr. Grant said. "It never fails! You take an ordinary chap like you or me ... (An ordinary chap like you or me? Didn't he ever see a Cary Grant movie?) ... put him in trouble way over his head, and then watch him try to squirm out of it. Never fails!"

That makes me LAUGH. Cary Grant comparing himself to Gene Wilder - as though they would ever be cast in the same roles. An ordinary chap!! Beautiful!

I think, too, that there is a deep and lonely sadness about Gene Wilder, which sets him apart from most other mainly comic actors. And again, when he is allowed to tap into that in his roles - even if it comes out in a funny way - it's marvelous. He's one of my all-time favorites. I basically just love him.

He was dominated by his mother as a child, and he never felt he could express anger. Ever. (Like I mentioned: lots of therapy in the book.) But what he could do was make his mother laugh. It became his entire reason for living. Interestingly enough, he started out in New York studying at the Actors Studio, with so many others ... and he started to get bit parts in shows, where he always made some kind of impression. I mean, honestly, is there any one like Gene Wilder? I guess you could say he is a "type" but the personality beneath the type is 100% original. He got noticed.

Arthur Penn, a bigwig at the Actors Studio, was filming Bonnie and Clyde and he asked Wilder to do the small (but my God memorable) part of the undertaker who is kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde, et al. To me, that scene still packs a punch. Isn't he awesome? It was his first movie.

Wilder talks about his experience on Bonnie and Clyde in the book. One of the things I really love about the book is how he lingers on what I would call his "A-ha Moments", when he started to understand the craft, and how to do it ... and it all started mixing together in a big pot in his subconscious. Here is him on Bonnie and Clyde:

My first scene began with Evan and me sitting in the back of her car, supposedly chasing the Barrow Gang. I waited for Arthur Penn to call "Action". Arthur was sitting alongside the camera - out of frame, of course - but not more than five or six feet away from me. As soon as I heard him say, "Action," I started to act. Sounds sensible, doesn't it? But Arthur immediately called out to the camera operator, "Keep rolling," and then he gave me my first revelation of what it means to be an "actor's director". While the camera was rolling, he said, "Gene, just because I say 'Action', doesn't mean you have to start acting - it just means that we're ready. I could see you had something cooking inside, but you weren't ready to act yet. Film is cheap. Keep working on whatever you're working on and start acting when you're ready."

The scene went very well.

When we took a break, the assistant director came up to me and said, "Don't get used to what just happened - you're not going to find many directors who work like Arthur."

Oh, and speaking of "A-ha Moments" - when Gene Wilder spoke at my school he told the following story about his response to seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Circus. You could almost say that Gene Wilder got the revelation for his entire career from watching what Chaplin did in that part:

I saw Charlie Chaplin in The Circus at a Chaplin film festival in New York.

Charlie has just gotten out of prison (one assumes) and is starving. He wanders onto the circus grounds and sees a father carrying his baby over one shoulder. The baby is holding a huge hot dog. The father - whose back is to Charlie - is talking to the man selling the hot dogs. The father looks back at Charlie once or twice.

Charlie makes the sweetest faces at the little boy, and - just when the father isn't looking - he takes a big bite out of the baby's hot dog. The father turns quickly to Charlie, who immediately stops chewing and makes sweet faces at the baby. When the father turns back to the hot dog salesman, Charlie takes another bite of the hot dog. The father turns around again, suspecting something fishy. Charlie stops chewing and makes wonderful googley faces at the baby.

The acting lesson from this film seems so simple, yet it inspired me for the rest of my career. If the thing you're doing is really funny, you don't need to "act funny" while doing it.

Wonderful stuff. Gene Wilder followed up Bonnie and Clyde with a project he had been working on for a long time with his insane friend Mel Brooks. Originally it was called Springtime for Hitler which, of course, became The Producers.

The Producers put Gene Wilder (and pretty much everyone involved) on the map. Wilder was nominated for an Oscar. It was an insane year for him. He became a giant and important star, and from then on was pretty much a huge playah. You list out some of his movies and you just shake your head, thankfully, that there were people around who knew how to utilize this talent. Thank God. If it were now, would it have happened? The material for wacko people like Wilder is just not as good. Who knows. Mel Brooks obviously was a big part of the whole story, and it's a collaboration that really stands alone. Look at what they did together!

But Wilder was not dependent on just one director after The Producers. He was a commodity. Everyone wanted him. Woody Allen cast him (hilariously) as the dude who falls in love (for realz, yo) with a sheep in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ... and Wilder, in the book, is so funny about how he made that real for himself. He used his Actors Studio training, and would sit with the sheep, off-camera, staring into her (actually, I think the real sheep was a he) eyes - and finding the beauty there. It's hysterical. He goes into great detail in his book about the look of that sheep's eyelashes, and how - once he really started studying her (him), he saw that those eyes were actually sexy. I am laughing out loud as I type this. But see, that's what sets Wilder apart. He works on these ridiculously comedic parts with a seriousness that serves him. Yes, the result is so so funny ... but for him the "way in" was always through the reality of the moment.

I mean, think about his total FREAK OUT in that first scene of The Producers when he's running around Zero Mostel's office jibbering like a lunatic. That is REAL. That is not just a guy being all antic and high-energy ... It is highly specific. He is not giving us a lot of bluster and sound and fury trying to INDICATE panic ... he really IS panicked. Funniest scene ever.

His collaboration with Brooks gave us some of his most memorable parts - but in the 70s he hooked up with an unlikely partner, Richard Pryer, to make a movie called Silver Streak (which I love so much I can't even tell you). And a new partnership was born. Who would have thought that those two would have such chemistry? It's amazing to watch. I've seen all their movies - I think they made four of them altogether - and it's a friendship captured onscreen, it's like you're watching something real - like watching To Have and Have Not and knowing that Bogie and Bacall were falling in love during the filming of that movie. Watching Silver Streak is to see the birth of that friendship. One of the best movie friendships captured in history.

You just LOVE to see them together. Partly because it's so bizarre and you wouldn't expect it. Pryor seems like such a solitary guy, and Wilder seems so almost surreal ... but together? Manic hilarity. Pryor was so quick, too - he needed a co-star who could keep up. Wilder could MORE than keep up. Most of those films were improvised, and seriously - I still watch some of them now and tears of laughter stream down my face. LOVE THEM.

Gene Wilder's book is rather touchy-feely, but if you can wade through that and get to his series of "A ha moments" about acting, it is well worth it. He's really an original. His career is unlike most other people's and although he seems to have pretty much retired from movies, he is still very active in the theatre, directing, adapting, etc.

I think one of the things that I get about Gene Wilder that a lot of movie stars don't have is that people really love him. Perhaps it's just because he was a widower so young and that generated sympathy for him but I don't think that's it. I think there is something about him in The Producers, and Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and all the rest that people just flat-out love. Big romantic leading men are awesome, too, but sometimes they have a short shelf-life. Gene Wilder's shelf-life is long, long, long, and it's because of that warmth that he brings up in people. You can see it when you bring his name up.

The excerpt I wanted to choose today is kind of famous. Gene Wilder has told it often, and other people who were there have also told the story. I post it here because it's a great story.

It illuminates, for me, what I think of as Gene Wilder's genius. Not everyone is a genius, and I've said it before - I think there are very few genius actors. I think there are a lot of actors with great skill and talent ... but geniuses don't come along that often. I think Gene Wilder is a genius. Not just because of what he is able to do while acting onscreen, although that is a part of it - but because of how he approaches things, how he looks at things, and how he sees things.

He was offered the role of Willy Wonka, and he thought about it, and came up with an idea, a thought, an image ... he didn't go any further than that, but he certainly knew where he wanted to start. It's not in the book. It came from Wilder's own imagination and it's brilliant. It MAKES the movie, in my opinion, and for exactly the reasons Wilder describes. Notice, too, how the director filmed - shot for shot - what Wilder said.

EXCERPT FROM Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

Although I liked Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn't sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

"What's bothering you?"

"When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself ... but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause."

" ... Why do you want to do that?"

"Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."

Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn't quite sure about this change.

"You mean - if you can't do what you just said, you won't do the part?"

"That's right," I answered.

Mel mumbled to himself, " ... comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "Okay!"

When I got to Munich - where the filming had already begun - Mr. Stuart showed me the entranceway to "Wonka's Chocolate Factory." I had practiced my forward somersault on a gym mat for three weeks before coming to Munich. The Scenic Department had made three Styrofoam bricks that looked just like cobblestones, which they laid into my entrance walk. That way I wouldn't have to hit the exact same brick with my pointed cane every time we did the scene. On the day they filmed my entrance, I did the scene four times, in just the way that we had planned. Then Mr. Stuart asked me to do just one without the cane. I took a deep breath, swallowed my better instincts, and did the scene without the cane. The next day, David Wolper - the head of the studio - watched the rushes of my entrance. As I was coming out of the commissary after finishing my lunch, Mel Stuart ran up to me.

"He loved it! David loved it!"

"What if he hadn't loved it?" I asked.

"Well, I would have used that take without the cane."

It's not that David Wolper doesn't have good artistic judgment - he does, and he loved what he saw. But if it had been Joe Levine who was bankrolling the film, I think he probably would have said, "What the hell's that guy doing with a cane? Where the fuck does it say that Willy What's-His-Name is a cripple?" I understood better why artistic control is so important to directors.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

The second volume of Callow's huge Orson Welles project (excerpt and discussion of the first volume here), this takes us through a chaotic (or, more so than usual) period in Welles' life. He had been brought to Hollywood in the wake of the War of the Worlds brou-haha, and had been referred to left and right as the "boy genius". His first movie - Citizen Kane - which took on William Randolph Hearst, a thing you just didn't do - was a debacle. Time has vindicated the film but nobody saw it when it first came out, because it was not distributed widely. It was buried, for fear of unleashing the wrath of Hearst himself. In this second volume, we see Welles trying to pick up the pieces. He went back to New York and did theatre, he directed his second film - The Magnificent Ambersons - World War II broke out, and he was sent down to Rio de Janiero to film Carnival, as a way of promoting friendship between Brazil and America.

That turned into a complete runaway train, along the lines of Francis Coppola filming Apocalypse Now for two years, with no end in sight. Welles had the time of his life in Brazil, and yet the memos flying back and forth from the studio to Brazil and back speak to the increasing anxiety of the bigwigs at what their "boy genius" was really doing down there. You can start to feel the larger forces of "the industry" at work. Because there is nothing more fun in Hollywood than pulling someone DOWN whom you have once built UP.

Volume II is more upsetting than Volume I, because, in a way, you can feel his demise approaching. And you wonder what that will mean for him, how he will handle it.

He was not just a victim of circumstance, of course. He could be wild and uncontrollable, and many times he didn't understand (or didn't want to understand) the rules of the game. Perhaps he understood the rules, but he had always felt that the rules didn't really apply to him. And for so many years they DIDN'T. I mean, if you spend your teens and early 20s having the most extraordinary journey of anyone ever, where you repeatedly do the impossible and are praised for it, you certainly can't be blamed for having an expectation that the rest of your life will go like that. Orson Welles was a giant man, a big lumbering man - but inside, he could be quite immature. He liked to party, to eat, to drink. He didn't really have discipline, he liked to work when HE wanted to work, and when he wanted to party - well, let's all party. He would have spurts of unbelievable productivity - it's like he never slept - and he had entire productions of things trapped inside his head, so when he would go to direct them - out it would all come. Set design, lighting, costumes, blocking - he had it ALL inside his head. Amazing imagination.

But let's talk about Callow's book for a moment. Volume 1 ends with Citizen Kane in 1941. Volume 2 goes from 1941 to only 1947. It is almost 450 pages long. This gives you some idea of the level of detail Callow goes into that I mentioned before. He seems incapable (and this is not quite a criticism) of discerning what is more important than something else. Volume 2 covers only six years. Orson Welles died in 1985! Of course Callow had to push it to three volumes, but judging from the first two - he might have to push it to 5, 6 volumes. There are times when I do think: "Okay ... I don't need to know anymore about this particular topic, thank you very much ... let's move on ..." But I cannot help but be awed at the amount of work he has done, and, frankly - although I knew the major events of Welles's life, Callow's book shows me that I didn't know the half of it. What happened between is given as much face-time as the big famous moments. I enjoy Callow's thoroughness. One of the reasons I enjoy it is because his writing is so good. You can hear his voice, first of all - it gives the book an almost warm feeling. You are in the presence of a guide, a guide who knows more than you do, but who can spin a yarn in a way that you want to keep listening. Callow analyzes everything. He, an actor, knows that much of what happens in an actor's life is the downtime, so he doesn't skip over it. But still: just know going in: This book is 444 pages long and it covers only six years.

To be honest, I don't care if it does go to 6 volumes. I'd read them all. It is a bit much, excessive, really ... but then again: I think Welles warrants that. It's a singular type of career, its own thing ... nobody else had a journey like his ... there is nothing in it that is similar to anybody else's. And THAT is worth noting at length. Which, God love him, Callow does.

I do think the strength in the books - and why they will last, and why they are important - is because of the analysis of events, not just the telling of them. Callow analyzes things. He looks at Welles's work, and is not such a fan that he cannot discern what doesn't work. But he doesn't ever just stop with "this doesn't work" - he goes into WHY. Now that, for me, is like blood to a vampire. I want MORE of that in these types of biographies, not less.

While Welles was whooping it up in Brazil, he left his film The Magnificent Ambersons in the hands of the editors at the studio, a tragic mistake. Famously, the film was butchered, and all of the existing prints - of Welles's version of it - were destroyed. A horrible loss. One which Welles never recovered from. His spirit was broken, in a way, by that experience.

He went on, though, and made Lady From Shanghai, a film I adore - with his then-wife, the troubled Rita Hayworth (whom he made a blonde).

The excerpt I wanted to choose today (and again: there are so many! I didn't know what to pick!) - has to do with Welles' filming of Jane Eyre, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Welles played Mr. Rochester. It was a troubled shoot, and it showed one of Welles's weaknesses: he wasn't directing the film, and so all of his energies had to go into his acting - but he found that to be boring and frustrating. It was not in his nature to just be an employee. He was meant to LEAD. So without that "leader" role ... who would he be? The situation at that time, in Hollywood, was not set up to congratulate and reward "auteurs" and the guys who did end up making names for themselves as personal film-makers (John Ford, Howard Hawks, others) - were company men, and able to work within the system. They loved the system. Hawks has said he never did a damn thing he didn't want to do. I believe him. But for Welles, it was more difficult. He had a problem with authority - unless it was him in charge. You can see the ego at work here, the ego that had served him so well up to that point - making it possible for him to break barriers and do the impossible ... but now it's starting to harm him. You can feel it happen in the book. You want to quietly pull him aside and speak with him seriously ... but alas, it is already too late.

Dying for the next volume to be published, Mr. Callow, even if it's a 700 page book about a two-week period. Let's get a move on.

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his recent triumphs, Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source, Jane Eyre. He decided that Welles should play Jane's moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of Doctor Faustus in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department. (Welles slyly suggested that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project. Jane Eyre was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been Tom Brown's Schooldays; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie, Joan of Paris, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself, as soon as Jane Eyre was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley (not hitherto noted either for his expertise in the work of the Brontes or for his skill as a screenwriter) and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick's permanent staff.

Selznick was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of Jane Eyre: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William 'Bill' Goetz - another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer - as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick's idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine's Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles's genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles's work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles's original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him, with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for Rebecca by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for The Campbell Playhouse: 'if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,' he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, 'we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.'

From Welles's point of view, Jane Eyre was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the sine qua non of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations - the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle - demanded that he accept the job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told Look magazine that Welles was only doing Jane Eyre 'in the interest of Uncle Sam's tax department,' demonstrating a dangerous contempt for acting on Welles's part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando's similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles's attorney Lloyd Wright took issue with Twentieth Century Fox's proposed contract, insisting that 'he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer,' even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation. Wright suggested a credit for him: PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES. Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he'd like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for Jane Eyre, he added, 'I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.' There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director's film. In the case of Jane Eyre, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles's actors - Erskine Sandford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead - two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann's score for Welles's radio version of Rebecca); and, no doubt to Welles's considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman - to the relief of both himself and Welles - was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

There was an active move on Welles's part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of Jane Eyre, a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. 'I don't believe Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,' he wrote to Goetz. 'Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position of simply having carried out Orson's plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.' Selznick had already conceded Welles's first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since Rebecca), because an acting-only credit would 'reduce' him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be 'a double injustice - to Stevenson, and to Joan's status as a star of the first magnitude ... I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, as the expense of another man for whom he has professed - very sincerely, I am sure - great admiration.' Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer, while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, 'general disbelief' that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing 'to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star'. Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles's name as producer in the credits; in their eyes, his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Welles's credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that 'there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word'. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles's perspective, Selznick reports that they have just learned that 'Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things, and that he had charge of the editing.'

All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational. To edit another man's movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know - to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed Citizen Kane (largely edited in the camera) and The Magnificent Ambersons (on which Welles's editing contribution amounted to precisely three days - and nights - in Miami). And yet: he had charge of the editing. The letter ends: 'please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox.' For whatever reason, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and he had to settle for second billing to the star.

On the set, however, he hardly composed himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine's not entirely objective account. 'Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,' she wrote in her autobiography, No Bed Of Roses. 'Orson's concern was entirely for Orson: Jane Eyre was simply a medium to show off his talents.' She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o'clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. 'Orson strode up to a lectern ... placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast, "Now we'll begin on page four!" ' Stevenson - 'slight, timid, gentlemanly' - was 'suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only.' The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that 'Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government "short" in between takes of Jane Eyre. At the same time he is scripting one broadcast a week and cutting Journey Into Fear. Also,' she added, with casual savagery, 'he is directing the director of Jane Eyre on how to direct.'

It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film - indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more - more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknownst to Fontaine), he had been involved in both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though there are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men's films: they won't let him make his own movies, so he's damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: 'Orson couldn't keep up to the position he assumed,' wrote Fontaine. 'He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.' On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo shoot: 'He'd been lying in the bath sulking because I didn't trust him to show up on time.' This aspect of Welles - the infantile tyrant - is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously. At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles's chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, 'which didn't jibe at all with Orson's version of his nocturnal exploits.' For once, Welles's version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur's.) Despite everything, Fontaine realized, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles's peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority in the editing suite.

Whatever the truth of this, the film - though certainly dominated by Welles's startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochster - is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation, which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan 'Buy yours in the theatre'. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who had just shot Rebecca for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland - formerly Barnes's assistant - had utterly set themselves against in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the way in which the story is being told. Barnes's work in Jane Eyre, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles's talents as a performer. Indeed, it might be argued that Welles's acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name - one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for The Third Man, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in Jane Eyre is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Bronte's 'stern features and a heavy brow ... gathered eyebrows,' like a mask, affecting a highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

This is by no means to say that the performance is uninteresting; on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait, touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giving us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This, his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme that he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sally Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles's massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film. Jane Eyre was not released till 1944, a long year after Journey Into Fear finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles's performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release of Jane Eyre was something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.

Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been 'the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth'. On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The Hollywood Reporter detected 'certain over-emphases that are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate', while Variety noted Welles's 'declamatory delivery'. Only James Agee in the Nation really took the gloves off, describing Welles's 'road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly. It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody; I imagine he did.' Unkindly Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, 'if I hadn't wanted, instead, to see a good performance.'

Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál MacLíammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice. Welles's performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles defended himself on curious grounds: 'There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,' he told an interviewer. 'I don't agree with those sedulous character actors who study and "live" a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it's a sure thing they aren't fitted for it. They can only ... detract from the true possibilities of the role ... if the role doesn't fit the actor then he's fake no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I'm striking a blow for realism.' Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then - or ever - to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

The second volume of Callow's huge Orson Welles project (excerpt and discussion of the first volume here), this takes us through a chaotic (or, more so than usual) period in Welles' life. He had been brought to Hollywood in the wake of the War of the Worlds brou-haha, and had been referred to left and right as the "boy genius". His first movie - Citizen Kane - which took on William Randolph Hearst, a thing you just didn't do - was a debacle. Time has vindicated the film but nobody saw it when it first came out, because it was not distributed widely. It was buried, for fear of unleashing the wrath of Hearst himself. In this second volume, we see Welles trying to pick up the pieces. He went back to New York and did theatre, he directed his second film - The Magnificent Ambersons - World War II broke out, and he was sent down to Rio de Janiero to film Carnival, as a way of promoting friendship between Brazil and America.

That turned into a complete runaway train, along the lines of Francis Coppola filming Apocalypse Now for two years, with no end in sight. Welles had the time of his life in Brazil, and yet the memos flying back and forth from the studio to Brazil and back speak to the increasing anxiety of the bigwigs at what their "boy genius" was really doing down there. You can start to feel the larger forces of "the industry" at work. Because there is nothing more fun in Hollywood than pulling someone DOWN whom you have once built UP.

Volume II is more upsetting than Volume I, because, in a way, you can feel his demise approaching. And you wonder what that will mean for him, how he will handle it.

He was not just a victim of circumstance, of course. He could be wild and uncontrollable, and many times he didn't understand (or didn't want to understand) the rules of the game. Perhaps he understood the rules, but he had always felt that the rules didn't really apply to him. And for so many years they DIDN'T. I mean, if you spend your teens and early 20s having the most extraordinary journey of anyone ever, where you repeatedly do the impossible and are praised for it, you certainly can't be blamed for having an expectation that the rest of your life will go like that. Orson Welles was a giant man, a big lumbering man - but inside, he could be quite immature. He liked to party, to eat, to drink. He didn't really have discipline, he liked to work when HE wanted to work, and when he wanted to party - well, let's all party. He would have spurts of unbelievable productivity - it's like he never slept - and he had entire productions of things trapped inside his head, so when he would go to direct them - out it would all come. Set design, lighting, costumes, blocking - he had it ALL inside his head. Amazing imagination.

But let's talk about Callow's book for a moment. Volume 1 ends with Citizen Kane in 1941. Volume 2 goes from 1941 to only 1947. It is almost 450 pages long. This gives you some idea of the level of detail Callow goes into that I mentioned before. He seems incapable (and this is not quite a criticism) of discerning what is more important than something else. Volume 2 covers only six years. Orson Welles died in 1985! Of course Callow had to push it to three volumes, but judging from the first two - he might have to push it to 5, 6 volumes. There are times when I do think: "Okay ... I don't need to know anymore about this particular topic, thank you very much ... let's move on ..." But I cannot help but be awed at the amount of work he has done, and, frankly - although I knew the major events of Welles's life, Callow's book shows me that I didn't know the half of it. What happened between is given as much face-time as the big famous moments. I enjoy Callow's thoroughness. One of the reasons I enjoy it is because his writing is so good. You can hear his voice, first of all - it gives the book an almost warm feeling. You are in the presence of a guide, a guide who knows more than you do, but who can spin a yarn in a way that you want to keep listening. Callow analyzes everything. He, an actor, knows that much of what happens in an actor's life is the downtime, so he doesn't skip over it. But still: just know going in: This book is 444 pages long and it covers only six years.

To be honest, I don't care if it does go to 6 volumes. I'd read them all. It is a bit much, excessive, really ... but then again: I think Welles warrants that. It's a singular type of career, its own thing ... nobody else had a journey like his ... there is nothing in it that is similar to anybody else's. And THAT is worth noting at length. Which, God love him, Callow does.

I do think the strength in the books - and why they will last, and why they are important - is because of the analysis of events, not just the telling of them. Callow analyzes things. He looks at Welles's work, and is not such a fan that he cannot discern what doesn't work. But he doesn't ever just stop with "this doesn't work" - he goes into WHY. Now that, for me, is like blood to a vampire. I want MORE of that in these types of biographies, not less.

While Welles was whooping it up in Brazil, he left his film The Magnificent Ambersons in the hands of the editors at the studio, a tragic mistake. Famously, the film was butchered, and all of the existing prints - of Welles's version of it - were destroyed. A horrible loss. One which Welles never recovered from. His spirit was broken, in a way, by that experience.

He went on, though, and made Lady From Shanghai, a film I adore - with his then-wife, the troubled Rita Hayworth (whom he made a blonde).

The excerpt I wanted to choose today (and again: there are so many! I didn't know what to pick!) - has to do with Welles' filming of Jane Eyre, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Welles played Mr. Rochester. It was a troubled shoot, and it showed one of Welles's weaknesses: he wasn't directing the film, and so all of his energies had to go into his acting - but he found that to be boring and frustrating. It was not in his nature to just be an employee. He was meant to LEAD. So without that "leader" role ... who would he be? The situation at that time, in Hollywood, was not set up to congratulate and reward "auteurs" and the guys who did end up making names for themselves as personal film-makers (John Ford, Howard Hawks, others) - were company men, and able to work within the system. They loved the system. Hawks has said he never did a damn thing he didn't want to do. I believe him. But for Welles, it was more difficult. He had a problem with authority - unless it was him in charge. You can see the ego at work here, the ego that had served him so well up to that point - making it possible for him to break barriers and do the impossible ... but now it's starting to harm him. You can feel it happen in the book. You want to quietly pull him aside and speak with him seriously ... but alas, it is already too late.

Dying for the next volume to be published, Mr. Callow, even if it's a 700 page book about a two-week period. Let's get a move on.

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his recent triumphs, Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source, Jane Eyre. He decided that Welles should play Jane's moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of Doctor Faustus in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department. (Welles slyly suggested that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project. Jane Eyre was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been Tom Brown's Schooldays; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie, Joan of Paris, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself, as soon as Jane Eyre was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley (not hitherto noted either for his expertise in the work of the Brontes or for his skill as a screenwriter) and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick's permanent staff.

Selznick was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of Jane Eyre: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William 'Bill' Goetz - another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer - as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick's idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine's Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles's genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles's work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles's original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him, with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for Rebecca by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for The Campbell Playhouse: 'if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,' he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, 'we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.'

From Welles's point of view, Jane Eyre was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the sine qua non of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations - the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle - demanded that he accept the job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told Look magazine that Welles was only doing Jane Eyre 'in the interest of Uncle Sam's tax department,' demonstrating a dangerous contempt for acting on Welles's part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando's similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles's attorney Lloyd Wright took issue with Twentieth Century Fox's proposed contract, insisting that 'he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer,' even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation. Wright suggested a credit for him: PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES. Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he'd like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for Jane Eyre, he added, 'I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.' There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director's film. In the case of Jane Eyre, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles's actors - Erskine Sandford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead - two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann's score for Welles's radio version of Rebecca); and, no doubt to Welles's considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman - to the relief of both himself and Welles - was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

There was an active move on Welles's part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of Jane Eyre, a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. 'I don't believe Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,' he wrote to Goetz. 'Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position of simply having carried out Orson's plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.' Selznick had already conceded Welles's first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since Rebecca), because an acting-only credit would 'reduce' him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be 'a double injustice - to Stevenson, and to Joan's status as a star of the first magnitude ... I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, as the expense of another man for whom he has professed - very sincerely, I am sure - great admiration.' Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer, while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, 'general disbelief' that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing 'to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star'. Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles's name as producer in the credits; in their eyes, his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Welles's credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that 'there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word'. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles's perspective, Selznick reports that they have just learned that 'Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things, and that he had charge of the editing.'

All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational. To edit another man's movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know - to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed Citizen Kane (largely edited in the camera) and The Magnificent Ambersons (on which Welles's editing contribution amounted to precisely three days - and nights - in Miami). And yet: he had charge of the editing. The letter ends: 'please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox.' For whatever reason, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and he had to settle for second billing to the star.

On the set, however, he hardly composed himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine's not entirely objective account. 'Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,' she wrote in her autobiography, No Bed Of Roses. 'Orson's concern was entirely for Orson: Jane Eyre was simply a medium to show off his talents.' She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o'clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. 'Orson strode up to a lectern ... placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast, "Now we'll begin on page four!" ' Stevenson - 'slight, timid, gentlemanly' - was 'suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only.' The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that 'Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government "short" in between takes of Jane Eyre. At the same time he is scripting one broadcast a week and cutting Journey Into Fear. Also,' she added, with casual savagery, 'he is directing the director of Jane Eyre on how to direct.'

It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film - indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more - more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknownst to Fontaine), he had been involved in both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though there are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men's films: they won't let him make his own movies, so he's damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: 'Orson couldn't keep up to the position he assumed,' wrote Fontaine. 'He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.' On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo shoot: 'He'd been lying in the bath sulking because I didn't trust him to show up on time.' This aspect of Welles - the infantile tyrant - is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously. At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles's chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, 'which didn't jibe at all with Orson's version of his nocturnal exploits.' For once, Welles's version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur's.) Despite everything, Fontaine realized, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles's peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority in the editing suite.

Whatever the truth of this, the film - though certainly dominated by Welles's startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochster - is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation, which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan 'Buy yours in the theatre'. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who had just shot Rebecca for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland - formerly Barnes's assistant - had utterly set themselves against in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the way in which the story is being told. Barnes's work in Jane Eyre, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles's talents as a performer. Indeed, it might be argued that Welles's acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name - one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for The Third Man, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in Jane Eyre is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Bronte's 'stern features and a heavy brow ... gathered eyebrows,' like a mask, affecting a highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

This is by no means to say that the performance is uninteresting; on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait, touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giving us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This, his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme that he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sally Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles's massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film. Jane Eyre was not released till 1944, a long year after Journey Into Fear finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles's performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release of Jane Eyre was something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.

Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been 'the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth'. On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The Hollywood Reporter detected 'certain over-emphases that are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate', while Variety noted Welles's 'declamatory delivery'. Only James Agee in the Nation really took the gloves off, describing Welles's 'road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly. It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody; I imagine he did.' Unkindly Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, 'if I hadn't wanted, instead, to see a good performance.'

Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál MacLíammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice. Welles's performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles defended himself on curious grounds: 'There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,' he told an interviewer. 'I don't agree with those sedulous character actors who study and "live" a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it's a sure thing they aren't fitted for it. They can only ... detract from the true possibilities of the role ... if the role doesn't fit the actor then he's fake no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I'm striking a blow for realism.' Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then - or ever - to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

The first volume of actor/writer Simon Callow's gigantic Orson Welles project. Volume II came out last year, and there will be a third and final volume. I am blown away by what he has done here. I am blown away on so many levels. This is not a surface biography. This does not just deal with events, although it certainly does do that as well, in intimate detail. This is a highly articulate book of analysis, and I just have to say: To anyone who is interested in Hollywood, Orson Welles, the craft of acting, the craft of directing, Shakespeare, the history of America, movies in general ... these books are MUST-HAVES.

There are times when you can tell Callow is so in love with his subject that he goes on for what I think is too long ... but that's part of the beauty of these books. Callow is under a spell. He is under Orson Welles' spell. He does not judge one thing to be more important than another. A play that Orson Welles wrote when he was 14 years old gets just as much face-time as his Voodoo Macbeth, one of the most important moments in American theatre. (Let's not forget that as a mere teenager he published a book - in conjunction with his acting teacher at school, Roger Hill, called Everybody's Shakespeare - Three Plays Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging, which showed Welles' early theories as a director, and adaptor). I mean, there is a lot to discuss there - Welles was a prodigy.

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

Nothing gets short-shrift. Callow is not an uncritical eye, let me not paint it incorrectly. This is not a fanboy. This is someone who is obsessed. And I understand obsession. It is not about LOVE. It is about CURIOSITY that will never ever ever end. Even the bad moments, the awkward moments, the failures have their interests ... or, perhaps to a true obsessive, the failures are even MORE interesting, because then the character of the person you are obsessed with can truly be revealed. Who knows. Callow is unafraid to criticize Welles, and he does so in a voice that is truly his own. We all know Simon Callow's acting. He has a distinctive speaking voice, kind of snotty and humorous. You can hear that in the prose here. You know, he'll include an excerpt from one of Welles' schoolboy compositions and say, "This is dreadful stuff, really, but it has good energy." (or something like that). He does not think that by criticizing Welles he is diminishing him. He does not feel he needs to protect or defend Welles. On the contrary. Someone as complex as Welles deserves to be taken seriously, and deserves to have his work be looked at on its merits - without all the myth and legend and brou-haha that normally is erected around it. People tend to be positional about Welles, and that does diminish him. Callow does not go that route (and he is eloquent about his reasons for this in the introduction to the book.) He weighs in everyone else's opinions, but he is trying to get at the whole man, in all his infuriating excess, and shining brilliance and crashing failures. Callow is absolutely wonderful. I cannot get enough of these books and I am dying for volume III to come out. Good work, Mr. Callow. These are MAJOR contributions to the Welles library - major major biographies ... and you deserve every accolade you receive for these extraordinary books.

Much of the Welles story is difficult to put together because he himself was such a teller of tall tales. You know, he went to Morocco when he was 16 years old and the stories he told of his time there, hanging out with a sheik in a freakin' tent and chillin' with the Arabs smoking a hookah pipe in the mountains, stuff like that, have just grown in the telling, and Callow just throws his hands up trying to corroborate some of the stories. All he can do is tell what Welles told, and then get eyewitnesses, if possible ... but a lot of the times he just says, "We'll never know what really happened in Morocco." Then there are times, like his time in Ireland as a teenager (which really is amazing) when he basically strolled into an audition at the up-and-coming Gate Theatre (trying to rival the Abbey) and got a part. Welles made it seem, in his letters home, and then later in his life, that he was given a lead INSTANTLY. That's not quite how it went, but he did, indeed, take the Ireland theatre world by storm as a teenager. He was the toast of Dublin at age 17. Like - what??

But for Welles, truth was never as interesting as fantasy, and he is at his best when he can project himself into his own fantasies - I mean, isn't that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? If you build it, he will come. But still: Welles always had to embellish, even if the truth was already so fantastical it beggared belief! So Callow wades through all of Welles' elaborations, and tries to put together what really happened in Ireland, etc. He is a detective. This is never about tearing Welles down. This is not about, "See, Welles told us THIS happened, but now we know that THIS is what REALLY happened, so everything that Welles ever did can now be seen as suspect!" I hate that kind of biography. It seems to resent contradiction, it seems to resent life itself, with all its ups and downs. Biographies that praise consistency above all else are terrible. What - is the biographer always consistent in his own life? Does he never contradict himself? Is he not large, does he not contain multitudes? I've had people who read my blog who want to catch me in inconsistencies - it seems to be the #1 reason that some people read blogs. "You said THIS in 2003, and now you say THIS in 2007?" Well, first of all, get a life. And second of all, yes. Because I felt THAT way in 2003, and I feel THIS way in 2007. You've never changed your mind? What the hell is your problem? I am not thrown off by inconsistencies. At least not in a private citizen like myself or like Welles. We do want consistency in public figures, in politicians ... inconsistencies THERE should be analyzed and questioned, since these people are actually trying to LEAD us, and create LAWS, etc. that affect us. But a blogger like myself who writes about boys she kissed in 1988 and movie stars she loves? What is the point of playing "Gotcha" with someone like me? Retarded. The same goes for biographies. I think it is in the inconsistencies that you can actually approach the source of life. That's where the real good stuff is: the gap between reality and fantasy, the gap between what really happened and what we SAY happened: Isn't that when we really can see someone?

I have to say that there were times, reading both of Callow's books, that I actually felt exhilarated, and that is a rare sensation indeed when reading a book. I was exhilarated by the detail, sure ... of these famous events I have already heard so much about - the Cradle Will Rock experience (which John Houseman describes so wonderfully in his own memoirs), the voodoo Macbeth done in Harlem with all black actors in the 1930s - Welles directed it at age 22 - boy was a phenom ... the Mercury Theatre, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the precedent-breaking deal with RKO which led to Citizen Kane ... and I was also exhilarated by how in-depth Callow went! He really tries to understand, not just what happened - but where it came from, and also the source of the success. Why was Welles' voodoo Macbeth so groundbreaking? And let's not just stay on the surface (black actors, Harlem) ... but let's look at his adaptation of Macbeth, what he chose to cut, how he rearranged things (Welles saw Shakespeare not as a great man to be revered and feared - but as a guy who wrote some awesome plays and they could certainly stand to be mucked up with a bit) - and what the adaptation said about where Welles was at that time. What interested him? Let us look at what he chose to cut, and speculate on why he felt that had to go?

Another reason why this massive biography of Orson Welles stands out is because Simon Callow is an actor. He writes like an actor. His concern is not intellectual, he is a man of the theatre - so he knows, in his bones, what an audition is like, what a first night is like, what rehearsals are like - but more than that: what the life of an actor really is all about. It's not fame, obviously, although it seems as though Welles HAD to be famous, there was really no other way. It is also the source of Welles' tragedy. But the life of an actor - trying to bring a text to life, and what that actually DOES to a person who lives that particular life. It's not a regular life. We all know that. It leaves wide swathes of space for creativity and fantasy - it HAS to. It's like the life of a writer which needs to leave wide swathes of space for solitude. Callow knows the camaraderie of being part of an acting company and his writing has ultimate authority. He also is a learned man of the theatre, having played Shakespeare and restoration comedy and every other thing for years - so he is on totally sure ground when he analyzes Welles' own interpretations of classic texts. He has that history at his command, which other biographers do not. Or if they do, it remains intellectual. When Callow says something like (and there's a certain phrase SOMEWHERE in these books that I am looking for, but I can't find it, so forgive the paraphrase), "This is one of the most difficult roles to bring to life in all of Western theatre, and it has sunk many an actor, from Olivier to Gielgud" - you know he speaks from deep experience. Perhaps he worked on that part and it sank him, too. Who knows. I LOVE that aspect of the book.

David Thomson, in his gigantic Biographical Dictionary of Film, has an enormous entry on Welles, and he closes it with:

In his last years, Welles did more commercials, he narrated documentaries, he attempted to launch fresh projects and to complete old ones. He appeared in It Happened One Christmas (77, Doald Wyre), The Muppet Movie (79, James Frawley), and Butterfly (81, Matt Cimber). But none of those matched his provocative role as the wise man in the back row of the theatre in his friend Henry Jaglom's Someone To Love (87). In short, he presided over the special chaos of his life as it closed, apparently seeking help and friends, yet secretly sealed against trespass. His unfinished films are now seeing the light of day - even pieces of It's All True. But so little about the life and work of Welles is all or anywhere near true. He inhaled legend - and changed our air. It is the greatest career in films, the most tragic, and the one with most warnings for the rest of us.

While much of Welles' journey was well-known to me, there was much I didn't know. He was clearly a prodigy of some kind, albeit a messy one. As a young boy, he was already on his way, and he was lucky enough (or persistent enough) to find mentors who could push him further and further along. He was doing summer stock as a teenager, appearing in Shakespeare, and he was also a student at an elite boy's school which had a stellar drama department. Welles remained connected with that school all his life. He did not forget his influences, and he did not forget where he came from (although he also would speak of things in retrospect and always put HIMSELF at the center of everything. It reminds me a bit of how Howard Hawks talked. Every great idea in Hollywood, every unpredictable yet ultimately successful casting decision was originally Hawks' idea. It's kind of endearing. It makes it hell on a biographer, but still: these men were storytellers and artists. If you're looking for literal truth, I don't know why you would look for it in show business and the people who practice it!)

Welles went to Ireland as a teenager, as I mentioned - and became highly involved in the Gate Theatre, which still exists, run by a fascinating guy named Micheál MacLíammóir. Look him up. Guy has as much interest as Orson Welles, and just as intense a reinvention of self. Welles was one of the most self-regarding of all artists, it was about the power of his personality - it always was - and how his voice (no surprise that Welles made his real mark in radio) could bring his personality (and others) to life. MacLíammóir's stories of Welles' first audition for them ("There's an American teenager in the lobby ... he says he wants to audition ... what should I tell him?") are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLíammóir in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several, and rightly so - what a life!!) describes being told about the American teenager in the lobby who was saying he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (none of it true) and that he wanted an audition. MacLíammóir says sure, send the kid in. In walks Orson Welles. MacLíammóir describes what happened next:

'Is this all the light you can give me?' he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really, you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.

Isn't that absolutely gorgeous?

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950 - of Eartha Kitt, MacLíammóir, and Welles. The two stayed friends their whole lives. And it wasn't an easy friendship - I suppose it never was with Welles - but they remained colleagues and collaborators til the end.

Welles' journey in the 30s, with the Federal Theatre Project, is well known. He hooked up with another young ambitious guy, John Houseman, and they began to put together projects, the first of which was what is now known as "the voodoo Macbeth" - a Macbeth put on entirely with black actors, mostly non-professional, at a big theatre in Harlem. Welles set the Macbeth in Haiti, with a stage full of crazy voodoo goddesses in headdresses, massive crowd scenes, drum beats - Welles was always about creating an impression, rightly or no. You can see clips of the voodoo Macbeth on Youtube, I think - and I've seen clips of it in the documentary I have about Welles at home. It may be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing - all style, no substance - hard to say - but it was a giant hit and it put Welles on the map. White people were flocking to Harlem to see the production. Black people came out in droves. It electrified the New York theatre world. Amazing. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, "voodoo Macbeth" is in my top 5. (If you must know, Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Chicago in 1945 is # 1). But God, to see some of those productions!!

Welles' notoriety grew with the shutting down of The Cradle Will Rock (go read Houseman's memoir for an account - that was the excerpt I posted of his book) - and eventually he and Houseman decided to strike out on their own and form the Mercury Theatre. The Mercury put on stage productions - Doctor Faustus and others - they got a deal for a weekly radio show where they would read classic literature, all adapted by Welles (did the man ever sleep?) - and of course, eventually, the "War of the Worlds" craziness came out of that - which then led to Welles being famous not just in New York but around the world. Hollywood took notice and pretty much air-lifted the entire Mercury Theatre company (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and all the rest) to do basically whatever the hell Orson Welles wanted. And what he wanted to do was a fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst. The envy in Hollywood was intense. Who is this Orson Welles character and why was he given such a deal, while I slog along in my ridiculous contract having to do whatever the studio says?? There was never a lot of good will towards Welles.

Citizen Kane which, naturally, got its props eventually - was barely seen at the time, because William Randolph Hearst sparked a war against the studios, saying that he would instruct every one of his papers to BURY the movie, or ignore it completely ... if it were to go forward. Nobody wanted to alienate William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was given a premiere, but that was pretty much it. It would be decades before anyone could see it again. Amazing. And so Welles made enemies from the get-go, and in a funny way, his career never really recovered its luster - although he would make some pretty damn fine movies (The Magnificent Ambersons comes to mind - although that film was so butchered by the studio that Welles, 40 years later, still couldn't talk about it without welling up with tears. I love that movie, but it is truly a tragedy what was done to it - and, seen in the light of retrospect, you can see the viciousness of the studio heads, sticking it to their young prodigy who had already caused so much trouble ... There is something personal in their attack on Welles. Well, you know how mediocrity hates genius! They set out to destroy him. Welles never really recovered emotionally from what was done to him with Magnificent Ambersons.)

Anyway, there is obviously a lot to talk about when we talk about Welles. And this is only the first volume! The first volume of the book takes us up through the short-lived release of Citizen Kane. I was tormented as to what excerpt to choose! His time in Ireland? Voodoo Macbeth?

The book is so juicy, so unbelievably interesting on every level ... you just let the book fall open and you dissolve into the events on the page, it's that engrossing.

That's a sketch Welles did, around age 13, of a young William Shakespeare. And that leads me into the excerpt.

I decided to go with the excerpt of the Mercury Theatre's famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Again, where the hell is my time machine? It was 1937 when that play went up. A terribly uneasy time in the world at large. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere, and the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Macbeth in fascist Italy. This was not necessarily a new or an original idea, many companies had been doing putting classic works in a fascist European setting - however, many of these were out of New York, and so word would not have reached Welles about them. It appears to have been original to Welles, or perhaps just an expression of the universal mood at the time. Welles' gift was never, by the way, in being original. It was in being able to take the dream that was in his own head and create it out in the world in whatever production he was involved in. He was never strictly an innovator, although much of cinematography as we now know it imitates what was done in Citizen Kane. But much of that was Gregg Toland's contribution, not Welles's. Welles's contribution was in believing in the sheer size of the project, and making it happen. He was a showman of the old school, a PT Barnum, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't genius. He played tricks. There's a reason why this guy was obsessed with magic for his entire life. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. Instead, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as he was concerned, another practical man of the theatre. Welles chopped scenes up, deleted characters, he rearranged the order if it suited him - pulling things forward when normally they happened at the end, whatever ... You can tell that he would be a movie director, which is more of a non-linear medium (or can be, with its potential for flashback, or dreams, etc.) Welles kept the stage huge and black with billowing black curtains. Most of the characters wore the black military uniforms of Mussolini's jackbooted thugs, and there was an intense air of uneasiness and violence around the production. People were blown away by it. It seemed to speak directly to their time, directly to what was going on in Europe. It took New York by storm. Voodoo Macbeth had been earlier that year - so to then come out so quickly with this Caesar so soon after, so different from the Macbeth, and Welles was only 23 freakin' years old?? Unbelievable. Unprecedented. The voodoo Macbeth was all about the spectacle. It was all about crowd scenes, and traffic control, and creating an impression of madness, noise and controlled chaos. The Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, and dwarfed human beings - the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes - so that their white faces shone out, in a tiny frightening way ... Such a different conception, look, feel ... from what he had done only 8 or 9 months previous.

Here is a series of images from Welles' Caesar, including some of his sketches for the costumes, setting, and lights (he did everything ... the whole production was in his head). I also included a Hirschfeld cartoon of the time.

Callow devotes an entire chapter to Caesar, going into detail Welles' own thought process, his adaptation, the casting of the roles, the rehearsals. It's a 40 page chapter. This is not a book for those who just want the author to get on with it already ... To Callow, there is nothing to "get on with" ... It is the journey. Let us now look at the fascinating composition Welles wrote when he was 10, and see what it might reveal about his concerns. Let us devote an entire chapter to his burgeoning interest in magic and what that signifies. Let us try to piece together his trip to Ireland through letters and diaries and interviews and let us do it over the course of 30 pages. He skips over nothing. Actually, if he skips over anything, it is Welles's personal life - which is actually a lovely change! Welles's personal life was always on the backseat to his career, so it takes a backseat in the book. Good.

The generosity of Callow stuns me. He leaves no stone unturned. He is able to speak about the craft of acting openly, without shame or embarrassment (lots of biographers do not know how to talk about acting - even when their subject was an actor, the writer gets baffled when they try to describe what the subject was doing, you can tell they are out of their league) - Simon Callow takes acting seriously, sure, but he also knows the buffoonery and fun of a rehearsal process and how ridiculous it can be. He knows how to talk about all of it. He takes his obsession to the most logical conclusion (three volumes), and there isn't one page that isn't interesting or illuminating. Bravo, bravo. THANK YOU, Mr. Callow, for these books and I cannot wait for volume III! Get cracking!

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

By 1937, though he didn't go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play. The Mercury, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles's mouthpiece, stated: 'As those familiar with the play are aware, Julius Caesar is really about Brutus.' Welles himself added: 'Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn't know how and gets it in the neck at the end. He's dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He's Shakespeare's favourite hero - the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He's the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against and wall and shot.'

He had concluded that the play was 'about' the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man's dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman's claim for the production that 'the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime' or indeed Welles's own claim at the same time that 'it's a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.' Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function - in the text, that is.

Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. 'Here we have true fan psychology,' he told The New York Times. 'This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It's the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It's the Nazi mob anywhere.' Significantly Welles's version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren ('Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!') but with Caesar silencing the crowd. 'Bid every noise be still!' We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. 'In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,' wrote Hank Senber in The Mercury, 'Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.' And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn't going to lose the stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn't fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles's mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play - or at any rate the production - is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar; he's Hitler, he's Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told The Mercury: 'I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I'm trying to let Shakespeare's lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.' It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators' work quite cut and dried. Jeanne Rosenthal wrote: 'Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg "festivals" were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.' (And which Houseman had used before in Panic.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in The Director in the Theatre Today the following year: 'I wanted to present Julius Caesar against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.' Welles's visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words 'oozing imagination', found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked them, pass them on, a 'humiliating process' for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve's admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: 'Sam, you can do better than that.' The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

'At the Mercury,' wrote Jean Rosenthal, 'nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals - with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.' And fun: 'the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along ... he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.' Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production. Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgment, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: 'I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators' talent, although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.'

For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his psychological baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. 'When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn't rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage hands' overtime, full speed ahead,' according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. 'He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative director ... in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone. This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, "All right, children." Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.'

'There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Orson was the big star,' said Teichmann. 'He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And "boy genius" was a term if he didn't create, he didn't fight it off ... You had to be a certain kind of personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. "Who me, tough? I'm a pussycat." You know, that was his thing ... he played people off against each other.' His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions - 'shame on you!' a favourite - if the actor's work wasn't to his liking. He was not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in Citizen Kane, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles's feet, and that's more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles would roar his name o ut, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren't on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: 'he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that's what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.'

Rehearsals for Julius Caesar took place, initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 'the place where the movie industry began' in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as 'the shot'. 'Every scene had to have a production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?' He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn't worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht had called the 'gestus', or gesture, of the scene.

Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsal would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering 'Be a singer, be a singer! Don't be an actor! Acting's horrible') openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed melancholic within the group. For the most part the actors worked happily at the service of Welles's invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, 'I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.' Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles's staging afforded him. Welles's instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tryone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, the actor. 'Your problem!' Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.

The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn't, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor an director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to The New York Times, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an 'essence'. 'I thought you could say "this is what it is to not take a position." ' Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed - 'consumed' is the word Lloyd uses - by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical, choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from Coriolanus; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed 'this goddam chanting and boom boom boom' for over three weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.

As for Welles's own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating their own performances); nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else's view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was - who his Brutus was - and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in Everybody's Shakespeare reads: 'he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual'). It was Welles's belief that he had a special gift for playing 'thinking people': not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 'that they're thinking about what they're saying, but that they think outside of the scene ... there are very few actors who can make you believe they think ... that's the kind of part I can play.'

Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as 'he who plays the king'. Curiously enough, his portrayals of 'thinking people' often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it. It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was - according to his own formula - simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.

This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn't want to evolve his performance; he didn't want to talk about it, or think about it. In Lehman Engel's acute words: 'His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.' In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can't; if you can, then that's it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting that acting wasn't a terribly important thing anyway.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

The first volume of actor/writer Simon Callow's gigantic Orson Welles project. Volume II came out last year, and there will be a third and final volume. I am blown away by what he has done here. I am blown away on so many levels. This is not a surface biography. This does not just deal with events, although it certainly does do that as well, in intimate detail. This is a highly articulate book of analysis, and I just have to say: To anyone who is interested in Hollywood, Orson Welles, the craft of acting, the craft of directing, Shakespeare, the history of America, movies in general ... these books are MUST-HAVES.

There are times when you can tell Callow is so in love with his subject that he goes on for what I think is too long ... but that's part of the beauty of these books. Callow is under a spell. He is under Orson Welles' spell. He does not judge one thing to be more important than another. A play that Orson Welles wrote when he was 14 years old gets just as much face-time as his Voodoo Macbeth, one of the most important moments in American theatre. (Let's not forget that as a mere teenager he published a book - in conjunction with his acting teacher at school, Roger Hill, called Everybody's Shakespeare - Three Plays Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging, which showed Welles' early theories as a director, and adaptor). I mean, there is a lot to discuss there - Welles was a prodigy.

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

Nothing gets short-shrift. Callow is not an uncritical eye, let me not paint it incorrectly. This is not a fanboy. This is someone who is obsessed. And I understand obsession. It is not about LOVE. It is about CURIOSITY that will never ever ever end. Even the bad moments, the awkward moments, the failures have their interests ... or, perhaps to a true obsessive, the failures are even MORE interesting, because then the character of the person you are obsessed with can truly be revealed. Who knows. Callow is unafraid to criticize Welles, and he does so in a voice that is truly his own. We all know Simon Callow's acting. He has a distinctive speaking voice, kind of snotty and humorous. You can hear that in the prose here. You know, he'll include an excerpt from one of Welles' schoolboy compositions and say, "This is dreadful stuff, really, but it has good energy." (or something like that). He does not think that by criticizing Welles he is diminishing him. He does not feel he needs to protect or defend Welles. On the contrary. Someone as complex as Welles deserves to be taken seriously, and deserves to have his work be looked at on its merits - without all the myth and legend and brou-haha that normally is erected around it. People tend to be positional about Welles, and that does diminish him. Callow does not go that route (and he is eloquent about his reasons for this in the introduction to the book.) He weighs in everyone else's opinions, but he is trying to get at the whole man, in all his infuriating excess, and shining brilliance and crashing failures. Callow is absolutely wonderful. I cannot get enough of these books and I am dying for volume III to come out. Good work, Mr. Callow. These are MAJOR contributions to the Welles library - major major biographies ... and you deserve every accolade you receive for these extraordinary books.

Much of the Welles story is difficult to put together because he himself was such a teller of tall tales. You know, he went to Morocco when he was 16 years old and the stories he told of his time there, hanging out with a sheik in a freakin' tent and chillin' with the Arabs smoking a hookah pipe in the mountains, stuff like that, have just grown in the telling, and Callow just throws his hands up trying to corroborate some of the stories. All he can do is tell what Welles told, and then get eyewitnesses, if possible ... but a lot of the times he just says, "We'll never know what really happened in Morocco." Then there are times, like his time in Ireland as a teenager (which really is amazing) when he basically strolled into an audition at the up-and-coming Gate Theatre (trying to rival the Abbey) and got a part. Welles made it seem, in his letters home, and then later in his life, that he was given a lead INSTANTLY. That's not quite how it went, but he did, indeed, take the Ireland theatre world by storm as a teenager. He was the toast of Dublin at age 17. Like - what??

But for Welles, truth was never as interesting as fantasy, and he is at his best when he can project himself into his own fantasies - I mean, isn't that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? If you build it, he will come. But still: Welles always had to embellish, even if the truth was already so fantastical it beggared belief! So Callow wades through all of Welles' elaborations, and tries to put together what really happened in Ireland, etc. He is a detective. This is never about tearing Welles down. This is not about, "See, Welles told us THIS happened, but now we know that THIS is what REALLY happened, so everything that Welles ever did can now be seen as suspect!" I hate that kind of biography. It seems to resent contradiction, it seems to resent life itself, with all its ups and downs. Biographies that praise consistency above all else are terrible. What - is the biographer always consistent in his own life? Does he never contradict himself? Is he not large, does he not contain multitudes? I've had people who read my blog who want to catch me in inconsistencies - it seems to be the #1 reason that some people read blogs. "You said THIS in 2003, and now you say THIS in 2007?" Well, first of all, get a life. And second of all, yes. Because I felt THAT way in 2003, and I feel THIS way in 2007. You've never changed your mind? What the hell is your problem? I am not thrown off by inconsistencies. At least not in a private citizen like myself or like Welles. We do want consistency in public figures, in politicians ... inconsistencies THERE should be analyzed and questioned, since these people are actually trying to LEAD us, and create LAWS, etc. that affect us. But a blogger like myself who writes about boys she kissed in 1988 and movie stars she loves? What is the point of playing "Gotcha" with someone like me? Retarded. The same goes for biographies. I think it is in the inconsistencies that you can actually approach the source of life. That's where the real good stuff is: the gap between reality and fantasy, the gap between what really happened and what we SAY happened: Isn't that when we really can see someone?

I have to say that there were times, reading both of Callow's books, that I actually felt exhilarated, and that is a rare sensation indeed when reading a book. I was exhilarated by the detail, sure ... of these famous events I have already heard so much about - the Cradle Will Rock experience (which John Houseman describes so wonderfully in his own memoirs), the voodoo Macbeth done in Harlem with all black actors in the 1930s - Welles directed it at age 22 - boy was a phenom ... the Mercury Theatre, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the precedent-breaking deal with RKO which led to Citizen Kane ... and I was also exhilarated by how in-depth Callow went! He really tries to understand, not just what happened - but where it came from, and also the source of the success. Why was Welles' voodoo Macbeth so groundbreaking? And let's not just stay on the surface (black actors, Harlem) ... but let's look at his adaptation of Macbeth, what he chose to cut, how he rearranged things (Welles saw Shakespeare not as a great man to be revered and feared - but as a guy who wrote some awesome plays and they could certainly stand to be mucked up with a bit) - and what the adaptation said about where Welles was at that time. What interested him? Let us look at what he chose to cut, and speculate on why he felt that had to go?

Another reason why this massive biography of Orson Welles stands out is because Simon Callow is an actor. He writes like an actor. His concern is not intellectual, he is a man of the theatre - so he knows, in his bones, what an audition is like, what a first night is like, what rehearsals are like - but more than that: what the life of an actor really is all about. It's not fame, obviously, although it seems as though Welles HAD to be famous, there was really no other way. It is also the source of Welles' tragedy. But the life of an actor - trying to bring a text to life, and what that actually DOES to a person who lives that particular life. It's not a regular life. We all know that. It leaves wide swathes of space for creativity and fantasy - it HAS to. It's like the life of a writer which needs to leave wide swathes of space for solitude. Callow knows the camaraderie of being part of an acting company and his writing has ultimate authority. He also is a learned man of the theatre, having played Shakespeare and restoration comedy and every other thing for years - so he is on totally sure ground when he analyzes Welles' own interpretations of classic texts. He has that history at his command, which other biographers do not. Or if they do, it remains intellectual. When Callow says something like (and there's a certain phrase SOMEWHERE in these books that I am looking for, but I can't find it, so forgive the paraphrase), "This is one of the most difficult roles to bring to life in all of Western theatre, and it has sunk many an actor, from Olivier to Gielgud" - you know he speaks from deep experience. Perhaps he worked on that part and it sank him, too. Who knows. I LOVE that aspect of the book.

David Thomson, in his gigantic Biographical Dictionary of Film, has an enormous entry on Welles, and he closes it with:

In his last years, Welles did more commercials, he narrated documentaries, he attempted to launch fresh projects and to complete old ones. He appeared in It Happened One Christmas (77, Doald Wyre), The Muppet Movie (79, James Frawley), and Butterfly (81, Matt Cimber). But none of those matched his provocative role as the wise man in the back row of the theatre in his friend Henry Jaglom's Someone To Love (87). In short, he presided over the special chaos of his life as it closed, apparently seeking help and friends, yet secretly sealed against trespass. His unfinished films are now seeing the light of day - even pieces of It's All True. But so little about the life and work of Welles is all or anywhere near true. He inhaled legend - and changed our air. It is the greatest career in films, the most tragic, and the one with most warnings for the rest of us.

While much of Welles' journey was well-known to me, there was much I didn't know. He was clearly a prodigy of some kind, albeit a messy one. As a young boy, he was already on his way, and he was lucky enough (or persistent enough) to find mentors who could push him further and further along. He was doing summer stock as a teenager, appearing in Shakespeare, and he was also a student at an elite boy's school which had a stellar drama department. Welles remained connected with that school all his life. He did not forget his influences, and he did not forget where he came from (although he also would speak of things in retrospect and always put HIMSELF at the center of everything. It reminds me a bit of how Howard Hawks talked. Every great idea in Hollywood, every unpredictable yet ultimately successful casting decision was originally Hawks' idea. It's kind of endearing. It makes it hell on a biographer, but still: these men were storytellers and artists. If you're looking for literal truth, I don't know why you would look for it in show business and the people who practice it!)

Welles went to Ireland as a teenager, as I mentioned - and became highly involved in the Gate Theatre, which still exists, run by a fascinating guy named Micheál MacLíammóir. Look him up. Guy has as much interest as Orson Welles, and just as intense a reinvention of self. Welles was one of the most self-regarding of all artists, it was about the power of his personality - it always was - and how his voice (no surprise that Welles made his real mark in radio) could bring his personality (and others) to life. MacLíammóir's stories of Welles' first audition for them ("There's an American teenager in the lobby ... he says he wants to audition ... what should I tell him?") are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLíammóir in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several, and rightly so - what a life!!) describes being told about the American teenager in the lobby who was saying he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (none of it true) and that he wanted an audition. MacLíammóir says sure, send the kid in. In walks Orson Welles. MacLíammóir describes what happened next:

'Is this all the light you can give me?' he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really, you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.

Isn't that absolutely gorgeous?

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950 - of Eartha Kitt, MacLíammóir, and Welles. The two stayed friends their whole lives. And it wasn't an easy friendship - I suppose it never was with Welles - but they remained colleagues and collaborators til the end.

Welles' journey in the 30s, with the Federal Theatre Project, is well known. He hooked up with another young ambitious guy, John Houseman, and they began to put together projects, the first of which was what is now known as "the voodoo Macbeth" - a Macbeth put on entirely with black actors, mostly non-professional, at a big theatre in Harlem. Welles set the Macbeth in Haiti, with a stage full of crazy voodoo goddesses in headdresses, massive crowd scenes, drum beats - Welles was always about creating an impression, rightly or no. You can see clips of the voodoo Macbeth on Youtube, I think - and I've seen clips of it in the documentary I have about Welles at home. It may be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing - all style, no substance - hard to say - but it was a giant hit and it put Welles on the map. White people were flocking to Harlem to see the production. Black people came out in droves. It electrified the New York theatre world. Amazing. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, "voodoo Macbeth" is in my top 5. (If you must know, Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Chicago in 1945 is # 1). But God, to see some of those productions!!

Welles' notoriety grew with the shutting down of The Cradle Will Rock (go read Houseman's memoir for an account - that was the excerpt I posted of his book) - and eventually he and Houseman decided to strike out on their own and form the Mercury Theatre. The Mercury put on stage productions - Doctor Faustus and others - they got a deal for a weekly radio show where they would read classic literature, all adapted by Welles (did the man ever sleep?) - and of course, eventually, the "War of the Worlds" craziness came out of that - which then led to Welles being famous not just in New York but around the world. Hollywood took notice and pretty much air-lifted the entire Mercury Theatre company (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and all the rest) to do basically whatever the hell Orson Welles wanted. And what he wanted to do was a fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst. The envy in Hollywood was intense. Who is this Orson Welles character and why was he given such a deal, while I slog along in my ridiculous contract having to do whatever the studio says?? There was never a lot of good will towards Welles.

Citizen Kane which, naturally, got its props eventually - was barely seen at the time, because William Randolph Hearst sparked a war against the studios, saying that he would instruct every one of his papers to BURY the movie, or ignore it completely ... if it were to go forward. Nobody wanted to alienate William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was given a premiere, but that was pretty much it. It would be decades before anyone could see it again. Amazing. And so Welles made enemies from the get-go, and in a funny way, his career never really recovered its luster - although he would make some pretty damn fine movies (The Magnificent Ambersons comes to mind - although that film was so butchered by the studio that Welles, 40 years later, still couldn't talk about it without welling up with tears. I love that movie, but it is truly a tragedy what was done to it - and, seen in the light of retrospect, you can see the viciousness of the studio heads, sticking it to their young prodigy who had already caused so much trouble ... There is something personal in their attack on Welles. Well, you know how mediocrity hates genius! They set out to destroy him. Welles never really recovered emotionally from what was done to him with Magnificent Ambersons.)

Anyway, there is obviously a lot to talk about when we talk about Welles. And this is only the first volume! The first volume of the book takes us up through the short-lived release of Citizen Kane. I was tormented as to what excerpt to choose! His time in Ireland? Voodoo Macbeth?

The book is so juicy, so unbelievably interesting on every level ... you just let the book fall open and you dissolve into the events on the page, it's that engrossing.

That's a sketch Welles did, around age 13, of a young William Shakespeare. And that leads me into the excerpt.

I decided to go with the excerpt of the Mercury Theatre's famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Again, where the hell is my time machine? It was 1937 when that play went up. A terribly uneasy time in the world at large. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere, and the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Macbeth in fascist Italy. This was not necessarily a new or an original idea, many companies had been doing putting classic works in a fascist European setting - however, many of these were out of New York, and so word would not have reached Welles about them. It appears to have been original to Welles, or perhaps just an expression of the universal mood at the time. Welles' gift was never, by the way, in being original. It was in being able to take the dream that was in his own head and create it out in the world in whatever production he was involved in. He was never strictly an innovator, although much of cinematography as we now know it imitates what was done in Citizen Kane. But much of that was Gregg Toland's contribution, not Welles's. Welles's contribution was in believing in the sheer size of the project, and making it happen. He was a showman of the old school, a PT Barnum, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't genius. He played tricks. There's a reason why this guy was obsessed with magic for his entire life. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. Instead, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as he was concerned, another practical man of the theatre. Welles chopped scenes up, deleted characters, he rearranged the order if it suited him - pulling things forward when normally they happened at the end, whatever ... You can tell that he would be a movie director, which is more of a non-linear medium (or can be, with its potential for flashback, or dreams, etc.) Welles kept the stage huge and black with billowing black curtains. Most of the characters wore the black military uniforms of Mussolini's jackbooted thugs, and there was an intense air of uneasiness and violence around the production. People were blown away by it. It seemed to speak directly to their time, directly to what was going on in Europe. It took New York by storm. Voodoo Macbeth had been earlier that year - so to then come out so quickly with this Caesar so soon after, so different from the Macbeth, and Welles was only 23 freakin' years old?? Unbelievable. Unprecedented. The voodoo Macbeth was all about the spectacle. It was all about crowd scenes, and traffic control, and creating an impression of madness, noise and controlled chaos. The Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, and dwarfed human beings - the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes - so that their white faces shone out, in a tiny frightening way ... Such a different conception, look, feel ... from what he had done only 8 or 9 months previous.

Here is a series of images from Welles' Caesar, including some of his sketches for the costumes, setting, and lights (he did everything ... the whole production was in his head). I also included a Hirschfeld cartoon of the time.

Callow devotes an entire chapter to Caesar, going into detail Welles' own thought process, his adaptation, the casting of the roles, the rehearsals. It's a 40 page chapter. This is not a book for those who just want the author to get on with it already ... To Callow, there is nothing to "get on with" ... It is the journey. Let us now look at the fascinating composition Welles wrote when he was 10, and see what it might reveal about his concerns. Let us devote an entire chapter to his burgeoning interest in magic and what that signifies. Let us try to piece together his trip to Ireland through letters and diaries and interviews and let us do it over the course of 30 pages. He skips over nothing. Actually, if he skips over anything, it is Welles's personal life - which is actually a lovely change! Welles's personal life was always on the backseat to his career, so it takes a backseat in the book. Good.

The generosity of Callow stuns me. He leaves no stone unturned. He is able to speak about the craft of acting openly, without shame or embarrassment (lots of biographers do not know how to talk about acting - even when their subject was an actor, the writer gets baffled when they try to describe what the subject was doing, you can tell they are out of their league) - Simon Callow takes acting seriously, sure, but he also knows the buffoonery and fun of a rehearsal process and how ridiculous it can be. He knows how to talk about all of it. He takes his obsession to the most logical conclusion (three volumes), and there isn't one page that isn't interesting or illuminating. Bravo, bravo. THANK YOU, Mr. Callow, for these books and I cannot wait for volume III! Get cracking!

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

By 1937, though he didn't go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play. The Mercury, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles's mouthpiece, stated: 'As those familiar with the play are aware, Julius Caesar is really about Brutus.' Welles himself added: 'Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn't know how and gets it in the neck at the end. He's dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He's Shakespeare's favourite hero - the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He's the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against and wall and shot.'

He had concluded that the play was 'about' the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man's dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman's claim for the production that 'the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime' or indeed Welles's own claim at the same time that 'it's a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.' Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function - in the text, that is.

Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. 'Here we have true fan psychology,' he told The New York Times. 'This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It's the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It's the Nazi mob anywhere.' Significantly Welles's version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren ('Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!') but with Caesar silencing the crowd. 'Bid every noise be still!' We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. 'In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,' wrote Hank Senber in The Mercury, 'Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.' And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn't going to lose the stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn't fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles's mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play - or at any rate the production - is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar; he's Hitler, he's Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told The Mercury: 'I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I'm trying to let Shakespeare's lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.' It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators' work quite cut and dried. Jeanne Rosenthal wrote: 'Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg "festivals" were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.' (And which Houseman had used before in Panic.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in The Director in the Theatre Today the following year: 'I wanted to present Julius Caesar against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.' Welles's visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words 'oozing imagination', found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked them, pass them on, a 'humiliating process' for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve's admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: 'Sam, you can do better than that.' The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

'At the Mercury,' wrote Jean Rosenthal, 'nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals - with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.' And fun: 'the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along ... he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.' Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production. Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgment, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: 'I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators' talent, although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.'

For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his psychological baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. 'When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn't rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage hands' overtime, full speed ahead,' according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. 'He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative director ... in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone. This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, "All right, children." Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.'

'There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Orson was the big star,' said Teichmann. 'He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And "boy genius" was a term if he didn't create, he didn't fight it off ... You had to be a certain kind of personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. "Who me, tough? I'm a pussycat." You know, that was his thing ... he played people off against each other.' His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions - 'shame on you!' a favourite - if the actor's work wasn't to his liking. He was not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in Citizen Kane, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles's feet, and that's more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles would roar his name o ut, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren't on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: 'he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that's what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.'

Rehearsals for Julius Caesar took place, initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 'the place where the movie industry began' in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as 'the shot'. 'Every scene had to have a production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?' He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn't worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht had called the 'gestus', or gesture, of the scene.

Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsal would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering 'Be a singer, be a singer! Don't be an actor! Acting's horrible') openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed melancholic within the group. For the most part the actors worked happily at the service of Welles's invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, 'I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.' Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles's staging afforded him. Welles's instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tryone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, the actor. 'Your problem!' Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.

The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn't, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor an director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to The New York Times, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an 'essence'. 'I thought you could say "this is what it is to not take a position." ' Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed - 'consumed' is the word Lloyd uses - by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical, choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from Coriolanus; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed 'this goddam chanting and boom boom boom' for over three weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.

As for Welles's own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating their own performances); nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else's view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was - who his Brutus was - and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in Everybody's Shakespeare reads: 'he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual'). It was Welles's belief that he had a special gift for playing 'thinking people': not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 'that they're thinking about what they're saying, but that they think outside of the scene ... there are very few actors who can make you believe they think ... that's the kind of part I can play.'

Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as 'he who plays the king'. Curiously enough, his portrayals of 'thinking people' often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it. It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was - according to his own formula - simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.

This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn't want to evolve his performance; he didn't want to talk about it, or think about it. In Lehman Engel's acute words: 'His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.' In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can't; if you can, then that's it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting that acting wasn't a terribly important thing anyway.

The Books: "The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage" (Eli Wallach)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach will be 93 years old on December 7. His career has spanned 50 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself), he continues to work, although more sporadically, and he and his wife, Anne Jackson (they have been married since 1948), also do performances together, of scenes and poems interspersed with their humorous banter (they're wonderful together - I've seen the show) - they perform at churches, schools, synagogues, YMCAs, benefits and charity functions ... it's really old-school what they do, almost vaudeville. It's charming.

In 2003, Wallach's agent called him and said that Clint Eastwood (his old colleague) wanted him for a small part in a movie he was directing. Wallach was nervous. He hadn't been in front of the camera in a while, at least not in a major motion picture, and he was old, and nervous about all sorts of things: remembering the lines, and also the possibility that his one scene would be cut (always a fear of any actor who plays only one scene in a film). I love how he describes his experience on Mystic River. It makes me love everyone involved - Eastwood, Kevin Bacon - for the respect they showed this giant figure of the American cinema, and how it all turned out:

I flew up to Boston on a Wednesday knowing nothing of the story or the script. I found that I was to play a liquor store owner. I memorized the three pages of dialogue that were given to me and prepared to act in the scene the following day. On Thursday morning I walked out to the set. Clint greeted me warmly. "I'm happy you agreed to do the cameo," he said, and told me that I'd be playing opposite two wonderful actors - Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne.

Clint waited patiently while the scene was lit, then walked over to me and whispered, "Any time you're ready, Eli." Not one word of direction was given. I felt relaxed and happy to be before the camera again. Bacon and Fishburne assured me that my scene would not be deleted in the final cut.

"You give us an important clue to the solution of the crime we're investigating," Kevin Bacon said.

It's a fantastic scene, I remember it well. One of the deals with this cameo was that Wallach would go uncredited, and that his name would not be used in any of the advertising. I think that was a smart move because I know that for those of us like myself - who love Eli Wallach, and who have been watching his movies since they were in their teens, who have the entire scope of his career locked in their brains forever - to suddenly see his twinkling mischievous face in the middle of that dark movie - was a wonderful surprise. It was like seeing an old friend. It really was. I remember feeling the audience around me respond to him. He has a couple of funny moments - not even lines that are funny, but the way he said the lines - and the audience, needing to laugh, was totally with him, every step of the way. It was beautiful to see him up there again.

In the old days of the studio system, character actors would work in movie after movie, essentially playing the same part, and it was very smart - because in that way the audience gets to identify with the person. They immediately think, "Oh. I know him. That's that guy. I love him." It is not a constantly rotating cast of people you've never seen before - there is the familiarity factor. Eli Wallach, in that moment in Mystic River was embodying what that old studio system used to be about. Even if people in the audience didn't know who exactly he was, they recognized him, they knew they had seen him somewhere before, and because of that - they warmed to him immediately.

Eli Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. His family was one of the only Jewish families in a primarily Italian neighborhood. I think it's interesting that Wallach played so many fiery Italians, onscreen and on Broadway, and if you think about it - even as a young man, he was an unlikely romantic lead. At least as far as his looks go. He was short, stocky, and not classically handsome. But women testify to his sex appeal time and time again in their own memoirs and autobiographies (Carroll Baker's comes to mind). He smouldered. He was one of those men who treated women with good humor and curiosity - which, naturally, made him a Chick Magnet. He wasn't cool or aloof, but emotional and impulsive - which really goes a long way to explaining his huge hit in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here) - where he played Alvaro, the hot and fiery truck driver who ends up shacking up with Serafina, the lonely sex-starved mystical widow who speaks mainly in Italian (played by Maureen Stapleton, in the role that made her a star). Talk about unlikely casting!! The story of how Stapleton got that part is one of those situations where an actress, in the audition process, just kept "showing up" - with all her talent and powers at full force - and they really had no choice but to cast her. Even though, on the face of it, she was all wrong. Stapleton had a plain face, a dumpy body, and wasn't seen as a romantic lead in any way, shape, or form. Stapleton said, in regards to her lack of beauty, "People looked at me on stage and said, 'Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'" I love her. God, I would have loved to see her in The Rose Tattoo!!

After Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her portrayal of Emma Goldman in Reds (well-deserved), she was asked if it was exciting to be acknowledged for her chops as an actress. She replied, "Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world." So you can see that Stapleton was perfect for Serafina, even if her looks weren't! Hilarious!

Wallach went to college in Texas and it was around that time that he started contemplating being an actor. It was really the only thing he wanted to do. He moved back to New York and studied acting at the famous Actors Studio, which helped him make all the contacts which would really matter to him in his career. He was one of those actors where it just as easily couldn't have happened, as could. He was on the cusp of the change in the acting world. If he had been a studio player in the 30s and 40s, he would have played crotchety small character parts (or, who knows, Bogart - with his shortness and his lisp and his toupee became a leading man - so I suppose anything is possible) ... but in the 50s, things were changing. A new style of acting was being practiced, made famous by people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Wallach was a part of that. Not to mention the fact that very early on, he got himself connected to Tennessee Williams, which was one of the most important relationships in his entire career.

Wallach did a bunch of plays in New York, one of the most formative being Tennessee Williams' short haunting play called "This Property is Condemned" (excerpt here). A young vivacious funny actress named Anne Jackson played the female lead (there are only two parts in the play). They hit it off. They hit it off so well that they moved in together (quite ahead of their time, in the 1940s!) and were married the following year. They have been married for 60 years. (So much for the old saying, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free" huh?) Amazing. They are good friends. You can feel their friendship when you see the two of them now.

Wallach spent his days studying sense memory at the Actors Studio, and his nights playing small parts on Broadway. There are very funny moments in the book where he talks about trying to meld what he was learning at the Studio with the more practical concerns of being in a show that played 8 times a week. Once, he was so fired up from his own emotional preparation, that he just couldn't wait - and said his line onstage - cutting 14 lines of his co-stars. He was devastated. How do you combine the two - your own needs and the need of the play? He went to Lee Strasberg, his teacher, upset. "I was ready to say my line THEN ... what should I have done?" Strasberg thought a bit and then said, "Wait for your cue." hahahahaha

Eventually, the big break came, with The Rose Tattoo, and he got spectacular reviews, as well as winning the Tony Award for Best Actor. Eli Wallach, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, was off and running.

He made his screen debut in another one of Tennessee Williams' projects - the highly controversial (as in condemned by the Catholic Church controversial) Baby Doll. This was a screenplay based on Williams' one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (excerpt here). I go into the differences between the two in that post, what was changed, altered. The movie is basically a comedy, albeit with its sicker elements (a grown woman lying in a crib sucking her thumb). In the play, she is obviously mentally disturbed, a stunted person who has the bodacious body of a full-grown woman - so she is treated like a sexual object when obviously, inside, she is about 10 years old. It is truly disturbing. In the play, Baby Doll (or "Flora") is ruined. In the film, she (played by Carroll Baker) is set free. It's still disturbing - obviously disturbing enough to cause the film to be protested widely upon its release ... but to see it now it's hard to imagine what the fuss was about.

Directed by Elia Kazan, they filmed on location (Kazan always liked to do that, he preferred it to using studio sets) - with locals as extras, which gives the film a true sense of place. Tennessee Williams called 27 Wagons a "Mississippi Delta comedy", which gives you some sense of where his mind was at - and I do think that Kazan and his cast (Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden) do capture that. Karl Malden is a ridiculous cuckolded figure, Carroll Baker is funny and sweet and unconsciously sexy, and Eli Wallach is manipulative and sexy).

Eli Wallach never stopped going back to Broadway, even though his film career had also taken off. He appeared in premiere productions of Teahouse of the August Moon, Mr. Roberts, Tennessee Williams' Camino Real and others.

He was part of the troubled cast for John Huston's The Misfits, and he traveled to the desert of Nevada for the shoot, with his family in tow. I think his daughters were just babies. The shoot ended up being long-drawn-out and very problematic - and Clark Gable would die months after completion. The entire production was shut down so that Marilyn Monroe could recover in the hospital from her exhaustion (brought on by insomnia and addiction to sleeping pills) - and everything was insane and chaotic. A wonderful book has been written about that shoot, called The Making of the Misfits (I posted about that here)

I think, though, of all the things Wallach will be remembered for, it will be for his participation in the "spaghetti Western" genre - his roles are beloved, and his characters are quoted wildly. Sergio Leone cast him in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - probably one of his best-known performances. Wallach had already been cast as a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, and there are funny stories about Wallach trying to figure out how to ride a horse, and all that, while on location. You'd never know he was a novice. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with those crazy close-ups, is a film fan favorite.

Eli Wallach's book is wonderful. It's not self-indulgent or badly written. He knows the power of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching anecdote. The book is full of them. It's a great mix of the personal and the professional - how he and Anne Jackson, who both had careers, made it work - or, let's say, just endured through it ... Jackson doing plays, Wallach doing movies, trying to raise a family and keep the household going. You really get a sense of the two of them. Funny story: When Baby Doll came out, he and Anne Jackson went to the premiere. Afterwards, he wondered what she thought.

As for my wife's review of the film, Anne sat next to me at the premiere. The moment I played my first scene with Karl Malden, she observed, "Never have two noses filled the screen so completely."

It's a real actor's book, because, in the end, Eli Wallach - with his diverse and sometimes bizarre career - was always all about the acting. He was not a huge star. Not like Brando or McQueen. He had leading roles, and was a "playah", as they say ... but he never was in that heady echelon of actors who become symbols or manifestations of a Zeitgeist, or what have you. So Wallach was always focusing, pretty much, on the job at hand. Each job has its challenges. It is the actor's job to make all of that comprehensible, to face each day with a problem-solving attitude, to look at a scene that might not be working and think to himself, "What can I do to make this happen?" Wallach's book is all about moments like that.

I knew immediately which excerpt I wanted to choose. Tennessee Williams had written a new play in the early 1950s. It was called Camino Real (excerpt here). One of Williams' most difficult plays, it predicts the experimental theatre of the 1960s, embodied by the work of Lanford Wilson (especially in his Balm in Gilead - excerpt here). It's surreal, not a strict linear play - it takes place in an imaginary place, an end of the road kind of place, and the stage is filled with people at all times: the misfits, the beggars and whores of the fringe ... not to mention cameos by fictional characters like Casanova and Lord Byron. These people all hover on "the Camino Real", a way-station for the lost of the world, the lonely ... I love the play. I understand why it is difficult to stage, and difficult for an audience to relate to ... and I actually have never seen it done, more's the pity. But I love it. It also has, in it, my favorite lines that Williams ever wrote:

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Wallach was passionate about Camino Real. He was cast as the lead - "Kilroy" (as in the grafitti messages of the time). To him, it was the most important project he had ever done, the one he was most passionate about. He turned down the role that Frank Sinatra ended up playing in From Here to Eternity (and won an Oscar for) in order to do Camino Real.

One of the reasons I love the following excerpt is because: Camino Real was not a hit. As a matter of fact, it was a flop. After the great run of hits Williams had written - Glass Menagerie (excerpt here), Streetcar Named Desire (excerpt here), Summer and Smoke (excerpt here) and The Rose Tattoo - all wonderful works, but with a more classical structure - Camino Real was seen as incomprehensible, self-indulgent, whatever. This was the typical story of Williams constantly being judged against his earlier work, as though he was supposed to just continue repeating himself. Williams was too good an artist for that. He is quite eloquent on that point. The critics were never kind to him after the 50s ... everything was like, "Well, this is no Streetcar Named Desire ..." and Williams would respond, "Of course it isn't. I was a younger man when I wrote Streetcar. I'm older now, I have different concerns and interests." God forbid he should try to stretch and grow as an artist. I think time has vindicated Camino Real. It is one of those plays that was ahead of its time. Its failure frightened Williams. He did "go back" to writing more traditional plays after that - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (excerpt here), Orpheus Descending (excerpt here), Suddenly Last Summer (excerpt here), Night of the Iguana (excerpt here), Sweet Bird of Youth (excerpt here) (I mean, honestly - even just writing all of that out right now gives me goosebumps) ... but I seriously think Camino Real is one of his best. That play haunts me. This past summer the director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festiva (check out who's on their main page!) contacted me to write something about Camino Real for their catalog (Camino Real was one of the productions they were doing that summer). It was a thrilling opportunity for me, to write about that play for such an esteemed theatre festival!

Anyway, Eli Wallach's section in the book about Camino Real is my favorite part of all.

(That's Wallach and Jackson in a production of Major Barbara).

Onto the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Cheryl Crawford had fallen in love with Camino and was determined to bring it to Broadway, even though it seemed like quite a gamble. Camino was unlike any of Williams's other work. It was a fantasy set in a dirty plaza somewhere below the border. It was filled with gypsies, pimps, panderers, fascist police, and a host of legendary characters: Lord Byron. Margerite Gautier from Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote. I was to play the role of Kilroy, an ex-boxer and ex-sailor who first appears at the top of a flight of stairs. On a crumbling wall, there is a message scrawled in chalk: "Kilroy is coming." Kilroy crosses out the word coming and replaces it with here.

I enjoyed working with Kazan; he often used sly means to build tension during rehearsal. One time during a rehearsal, he took me aside and told me to approach a group of strangers onstage. "You're alone and you're scared," he said, "so go on and make friends." Meanwhile, he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, "Ignore this stranger; he's a gringo, and he has bad breath."

Kazan worked long and hard shaping Tennessee's play into a bold and startling fantastic extravaganza. Rehearsals were long and exhausting and yet strangely exhilarating. All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before. Even though Camino was a fantasy, Kazan told us that the play would be stronger if each role was performed with a sense of truth.

For me, the play was very physically demanding. At one point, I had to jump offstage while police chased me, then run through the audience screaming, "Where the hell is the Greyhound bus depot?" I'd run up one aisle, then down another. People would have to stand to allow me to pass. Then I'd run up to the balcony, enter the box seats, climb over the rail, and jump directly onstage, just like John Wilkes Booth did after he'd shot President Lincoln. Once I was caught by the police, I was ordered to kneel onstage and a clown's hat was clapped over my head. Fastened to the hat were eyeglasses with long string attached to them; the nose was a red Ping-Pong-ball-shaped bulb.

"Light your nose," the policeman would say, and I would press the button to light my nose, which kept blinking on and off as the theater lights went down.

Audiences were puzzled by some of the scenes. And in early previews, many walked out. The play was savagely attacked by the critics. Leading the charge was Walter Kerr, critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review with a terse sentence: "Williams is our greatest playwright. And this is his worst play."

After the reviews had come out, Tennessee sat down and wrote a letter to Cheryl Crawford, the producer:

Dear Cheryl,
Whenever I talk about you I say, "Cheryl is a great fighter. She's always there when you need her." In China, in the old days, they used to give an old man an opium pipe. I suppose now they just shoot him. I think we should show fight in this situation. I'm enclosing a letter I just wrote to that critic Walter Kerr.

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn't have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

I don't believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee's letter. But there's one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. "Lately," Lord Byron says, "I've been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there's nothing else." Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Camino's end came quickly, with a crisp closing notice posted on the backstage bulletin board. We had just completed our fifty-sixth performance. The closing of a play is like a death in the family, and it leaves a deep scar on an actor's ego. I remember packing up all my belongings in the dressing room, then walking out into the rainy night. "Why me?" I thought. I loved the cast, the writing, the direction, but thankfully Camino didn't die. Over the years, many regional theaters have given Williams's fantasy a second chance.

I've never regretted the choice of doing Camino Real instead of From Here to Eternity. To me, Camino was the greatest experience I had in the theater.

The Books: "The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage" (Eli Wallach)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach will be 93 years old on December 7. His career has spanned 50 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself), he continues to work, although more sporadically, and he and his wife, Anne Jackson (they have been married since 1948), also do performances together, of scenes and poems interspersed with their humorous banter (they're wonderful together - I've seen the show) - they perform at churches, schools, synagogues, YMCAs, benefits and charity functions ... it's really old-school what they do, almost vaudeville. It's charming.

In 2003, Wallach's agent called him and said that Clint Eastwood (his old colleague) wanted him for a small part in a movie he was directing. Wallach was nervous. He hadn't been in front of the camera in a while, at least not in a major motion picture, and he was old, and nervous about all sorts of things: remembering the lines, and also the possibility that his one scene would be cut (always a fear of any actor who plays only one scene in a film). I love how he describes his experience on Mystic River. It makes me love everyone involved - Eastwood, Kevin Bacon - for the respect they showed this giant figure of the American cinema, and how it all turned out:

I flew up to Boston on a Wednesday knowing nothing of the story or the script. I found that I was to play a liquor store owner. I memorized the three pages of dialogue that were given to me and prepared to act in the scene the following day. On Thursday morning I walked out to the set. Clint greeted me warmly. "I'm happy you agreed to do the cameo," he said, and told me that I'd be playing opposite two wonderful actors - Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne.

Clint waited patiently while the scene was lit, then walked over to me and whispered, "Any time you're ready, Eli." Not one word of direction was given. I felt relaxed and happy to be before the camera again. Bacon and Fishburne assured me that my scene would not be deleted in the final cut.

"You give us an important clue to the solution of the crime we're investigating," Kevin Bacon said.

It's a fantastic scene, I remember it well. One of the deals with this cameo was that Wallach would go uncredited, and that his name would not be used in any of the advertising. I think that was a smart move because I know that for those of us like myself - who love Eli Wallach, and who have been watching his movies since they were in their teens, who have the entire scope of his career locked in their brains forever - to suddenly see his twinkling mischievous face in the middle of that dark movie - was a wonderful surprise. It was like seeing an old friend. It really was. I remember feeling the audience around me respond to him. He has a couple of funny moments - not even lines that are funny, but the way he said the lines - and the audience, needing to laugh, was totally with him, every step of the way. It was beautiful to see him up there again.

In the old days of the studio system, character actors would work in movie after movie, essentially playing the same part, and it was very smart - because in that way the audience gets to identify with the person. They immediately think, "Oh. I know him. That's that guy. I love him." It is not a constantly rotating cast of people you've never seen before - there is the familiarity factor. Eli Wallach, in that moment in Mystic River was embodying what that old studio system used to be about. Even if people in the audience didn't know who exactly he was, they recognized him, they knew they had seen him somewhere before, and because of that - they warmed to him immediately.

Eli Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. His family was one of the only Jewish families in a primarily Italian neighborhood. I think it's interesting that Wallach played so many fiery Italians, onscreen and on Broadway, and if you think about it - even as a young man, he was an unlikely romantic lead. At least as far as his looks go. He was short, stocky, and not classically handsome. But women testify to his sex appeal time and time again in their own memoirs and autobiographies (Carroll Baker's comes to mind). He smouldered. He was one of those men who treated women with good humor and curiosity - which, naturally, made him a Chick Magnet. He wasn't cool or aloof, but emotional and impulsive - which really goes a long way to explaining his huge hit in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here) - where he played Alvaro, the hot and fiery truck driver who ends up shacking up with Serafina, the lonely sex-starved mystical widow who speaks mainly in Italian (played by Maureen Stapleton, in the role that made her a star). Talk about unlikely casting!! The story of how Stapleton got that part is one of those situations where an actress, in the audition process, just kept "showing up" - with all her talent and powers at full force - and they really had no choice but to cast her. Even though, on the face of it, she was all wrong. Stapleton had a plain face, a dumpy body, and wasn't seen as a romantic lead in any way, shape, or form. Stapleton said, in regards to her lack of beauty, "People looked at me on stage and said, 'Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'" I love her. God, I would have loved to see her in The Rose Tattoo!!

After Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her portrayal of Emma Goldman in Reds (well-deserved), she was asked if it was exciting to be acknowledged for her chops as an actress. She replied, "Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world." So you can see that Stapleton was perfect for Serafina, even if her looks weren't! Hilarious!

Wallach went to college in Texas and it was around that time that he started contemplating being an actor. It was really the only thing he wanted to do. He moved back to New York and studied acting at the famous Actors Studio, which helped him make all the contacts which would really matter to him in his career. He was one of those actors where it just as easily couldn't have happened, as could. He was on the cusp of the change in the acting world. If he had been a studio player in the 30s and 40s, he would have played crotchety small character parts (or, who knows, Bogart - with his shortness and his lisp and his toupee became a leading man - so I suppose anything is possible) ... but in the 50s, things were changing. A new style of acting was being practiced, made famous by people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Wallach was a part of that. Not to mention the fact that very early on, he got himself connected to Tennessee Williams, which was one of the most important relationships in his entire career.

Wallach did a bunch of plays in New York, one of the most formative being Tennessee Williams' short haunting play called "This Property is Condemned" (excerpt here). A young vivacious funny actress named Anne Jackson played the female lead (there are only two parts in the play). They hit it off. They hit it off so well that they moved in together (quite ahead of their time, in the 1940s!) and were married the following year. They have been married for 60 years. (So much for the old saying, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free" huh?) Amazing. They are good friends. You can feel their friendship when you see the two of them now.

Wallach spent his days studying sense memory at the Actors Studio, and his nights playing small parts on Broadway. There are very funny moments in the book where he talks about trying to meld what he was learning at the Studio with the more practical concerns of being in a show that played 8 times a week. Once, he was so fired up from his own emotional preparation, that he just couldn't wait - and said his line onstage - cutting 14 lines of his co-stars. He was devastated. How do you combine the two - your own needs and the need of the play? He went to Lee Strasberg, his teacher, upset. "I was ready to say my line THEN ... what should I have done?" Strasberg thought a bit and then said, "Wait for your cue." hahahahaha

Eventually, the big break came, with The Rose Tattoo, and he got spectacular reviews, as well as winning the Tony Award for Best Actor. Eli Wallach, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, was off and running.

He made his screen debut in another one of Tennessee Williams' projects - the highly controversial (as in condemned by the Catholic Church controversial) Baby Doll. This was a screenplay based on Williams' one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (excerpt here). I go into the differences between the two in that post, what was changed, altered. The movie is basically a comedy, albeit with its sicker elements (a grown woman lying in a crib sucking her thumb). In the play, she is obviously mentally disturbed, a stunted person who has the bodacious body of a full-grown woman - so she is treated like a sexual object when obviously, inside, she is about 10 years old. It is truly disturbing. In the play, Baby Doll (or "Flora") is ruined. In the film, she (played by Carroll Baker) is set free. It's still disturbing - obviously disturbing enough to cause the film to be protested widely upon its release ... but to see it now it's hard to imagine what the fuss was about.

Directed by Elia Kazan, they filmed on location (Kazan always liked to do that, he preferred it to using studio sets) - with locals as extras, which gives the film a true sense of place. Tennessee Williams called 27 Wagons a "Mississippi Delta comedy", which gives you some sense of where his mind was at - and I do think that Kazan and his cast (Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden) do capture that. Karl Malden is a ridiculous cuckolded figure, Carroll Baker is funny and sweet and unconsciously sexy, and Eli Wallach is manipulative and sexy).

Eli Wallach never stopped going back to Broadway, even though his film career had also taken off. He appeared in premiere productions of Teahouse of the August Moon, Mr. Roberts, Tennessee Williams' Camino Real and others.

He was part of the troubled cast for John Huston's The Misfits, and he traveled to the desert of Nevada for the shoot, with his family in tow. I think his daughters were just babies. The shoot ended up being long-drawn-out and very problematic - and Clark Gable would die months after completion. The entire production was shut down so that Marilyn Monroe could recover in the hospital from her exhaustion (brought on by insomnia and addiction to sleeping pills) - and everything was insane and chaotic. A wonderful book has been written about that shoot, called The Making of the Misfits (I posted about that here)

I think, though, of all the things Wallach will be remembered for, it will be for his participation in the "spaghetti Western" genre - his roles are beloved, and his characters are quoted wildly. Sergio Leone cast him in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - probably one of his best-known performances. Wallach had already been cast as a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, and there are funny stories about Wallach trying to figure out how to ride a horse, and all that, while on location. You'd never know he was a novice. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with those crazy close-ups, is a film fan favorite.

Eli Wallach's book is wonderful. It's not self-indulgent or badly written. He knows the power of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching anecdote. The book is full of them. It's a great mix of the personal and the professional - how he and Anne Jackson, who both had careers, made it work - or, let's say, just endured through it ... Jackson doing plays, Wallach doing movies, trying to raise a family and keep the household going. You really get a sense of the two of them. Funny story: When Baby Doll came out, he and Anne Jackson went to the premiere. Afterwards, he wondered what she thought.

As for my wife's review of the film, Anne sat next to me at the premiere. The moment I played my first scene with Karl Malden, she observed, "Never have two noses filled the screen so completely."

It's a real actor's book, because, in the end, Eli Wallach - with his diverse and sometimes bizarre career - was always all about the acting. He was not a huge star. Not like Brando or McQueen. He had leading roles, and was a "playah", as they say ... but he never was in that heady echelon of actors who become symbols or manifestations of a Zeitgeist, or what have you. So Wallach was always focusing, pretty much, on the job at hand. Each job has its challenges. It is the actor's job to make all of that comprehensible, to face each day with a problem-solving attitude, to look at a scene that might not be working and think to himself, "What can I do to make this happen?" Wallach's book is all about moments like that.

I knew immediately which excerpt I wanted to choose. Tennessee Williams had written a new play in the early 1950s. It was called Camino Real (excerpt here). One of Williams' most difficult plays, it predicts the experimental theatre of the 1960s, embodied by the work of Lanford Wilson (especially in his Balm in Gilead - excerpt here). It's surreal, not a strict linear play - it takes place in an imaginary place, an end of the road kind of place, and the stage is filled with people at all times: the misfits, the beggars and whores of the fringe ... not to mention cameos by fictional characters like Casanova and Lord Byron. These people all hover on "the Camino Real", a way-station for the lost of the world, the lonely ... I love the play. I understand why it is difficult to stage, and difficult for an audience to relate to ... and I actually have never seen it done, more's the pity. But I love it. It also has, in it, my favorite lines that Williams ever wrote:

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Wallach was passionate about Camino Real. He was cast as the lead - "Kilroy" (as in the grafitti messages of the time). To him, it was the most important project he had ever done, the one he was most passionate about. He turned down the role that Frank Sinatra ended up playing in From Here to Eternity (and won an Oscar for) in order to do Camino Real.

One of the reasons I love the following excerpt is because: Camino Real was not a hit. As a matter of fact, it was a flop. After the great run of hits Williams had written - Glass Menagerie (excerpt here), Streetcar Named Desire (excerpt here), Summer and Smoke (excerpt here) and The Rose Tattoo - all wonderful works, but with a more classical structure - Camino Real was seen as incomprehensible, self-indulgent, whatever. This was the typical story of Williams constantly being judged against his earlier work, as though he was supposed to just continue repeating himself. Williams was too good an artist for that. He is quite eloquent on that point. The critics were never kind to him after the 50s ... everything was like, "Well, this is no Streetcar Named Desire ..." and Williams would respond, "Of course it isn't. I was a younger man when I wrote Streetcar. I'm older now, I have different concerns and interests." God forbid he should try to stretch and grow as an artist. I think time has vindicated Camino Real. It is one of those plays that was ahead of its time. Its failure frightened Williams. He did "go back" to writing more traditional plays after that - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (excerpt here), Orpheus Descending (excerpt here), Suddenly Last Summer (excerpt here), Night of the Iguana (excerpt here), Sweet Bird of Youth (excerpt here) (I mean, honestly - even just writing all of that out right now gives me goosebumps) ... but I seriously think Camino Real is one of his best. That play haunts me. This past summer the director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festiva (check out who's on their main page!) contacted me to write something about Camino Real for their catalog (Camino Real was one of the productions they were doing that summer). It was a thrilling opportunity for me, to write about that play for such an esteemed theatre festival!

Anyway, Eli Wallach's section in the book about Camino Real is my favorite part of all.

(That's Wallach and Jackson in a production of Major Barbara).

Onto the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Cheryl Crawford had fallen in love with Camino and was determined to bring it to Broadway, even though it seemed like quite a gamble. Camino was unlike any of Williams's other work. It was a fantasy set in a dirty plaza somewhere below the border. It was filled with gypsies, pimps, panderers, fascist police, and a host of legendary characters: Lord Byron. Margerite Gautier from Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote. I was to play the role of Kilroy, an ex-boxer and ex-sailor who first appears at the top of a flight of stairs. On a crumbling wall, there is a message scrawled in chalk: "Kilroy is coming." Kilroy crosses out the word coming and replaces it with here.

I enjoyed working with Kazan; he often used sly means to build tension during rehearsal. One time during a rehearsal, he took me aside and told me to approach a group of strangers onstage. "You're alone and you're scared," he said, "so go on and make friends." Meanwhile, he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, "Ignore this stranger; he's a gringo, and he has bad breath."

Kazan worked long and hard shaping Tennessee's play into a bold and startling fantastic extravaganza. Rehearsals were long and exhausting and yet strangely exhilarating. All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before. Even though Camino was a fantasy, Kazan told us that the play would be stronger if each role was performed with a sense of truth.

For me, the play was very physically demanding. At one point, I had to jump offstage while police chased me, then run through the audience screaming, "Where the hell is the Greyhound bus depot?" I'd run up one aisle, then down another. People would have to stand to allow me to pass. Then I'd run up to the balcony, enter the box seats, climb over the rail, and jump directly onstage, just like John Wilkes Booth did after he'd shot President Lincoln. Once I was caught by the police, I was ordered to kneel onstage and a clown's hat was clapped over my head. Fastened to the hat were eyeglasses with long string attached to them; the nose was a red Ping-Pong-ball-shaped bulb.

"Light your nose," the policeman would say, and I would press the button to light my nose, which kept blinking on and off as the theater lights went down.

Audiences were puzzled by some of the scenes. And in early previews, many walked out. The play was savagely attacked by the critics. Leading the charge was Walter Kerr, critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review with a terse sentence: "Williams is our greatest playwright. And this is his worst play."

After the reviews had come out, Tennessee sat down and wrote a letter to Cheryl Crawford, the producer:

Dear Cheryl,
Whenever I talk about you I say, "Cheryl is a great fighter. She's always there when you need her." In China, in the old days, they used to give an old man an opium pipe. I suppose now they just shoot him. I think we should show fight in this situation. I'm enclosing a letter I just wrote to that critic Walter Kerr.

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn't have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

I don't believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee's letter. But there's one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. "Lately," Lord Byron says, "I've been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there's nothing else." Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Camino's end came quickly, with a crisp closing notice posted on the backstage bulletin board. We had just completed our fifty-sixth performance. The closing of a play is like a death in the family, and it leaves a deep scar on an actor's ego. I remember packing up all my belongings in the dressing room, then walking out into the rainy night. "Why me?" I thought. I loved the cast, the writing, the direction, but thankfully Camino didn't die. Over the years, many regional theaters have given Williams's fantasy a second chance.

I've never regretted the choice of doing Camino Real instead of From Here to Eternity. To me, Camino was the greatest experience I had in the theater.

The Books: "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth" (Lana Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

You know, you can open up George Eliot's Middlemarch and find a gem of language on every page. Not an exaggeration. It's almost overwhelming that book, you want her to slow down ... because her genius is just too much, I am just a mere mortal, George, let me catch up! One of the things I like to do is just flip open Middlemarch to any page and read the first sentence that I see. It's amazing how often it's a really good one.

Well. Lana Turner's autobiography is the same way.

Is this the first time in the history of the planet that Lana Turner was compared to George Eliot? I hope so, because it's about time.

You literally cannot open this book without finding an awesome sentence. I'm not being sarcastic - although there is much to make fun of here as well. But why I think this book is so awesome is its complete and utter lack of irony (which is really quite refreshing) - not to mention its open-faced assumption that we will care about every detail. Of course we do, Lana! You're Lana Turner! Give us the dish! And boy does she ever. I suppose if you only looked at this book thru a cynical lens, you'd find it irritating and self-involved.

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

It IS self-involved. That is the REASON it is so good. Also, I have to ask: Why are you reading the autobiography of a famous film star and looking for calm reasonable detachment? That's YOUR problem.

She appears to remember every outfit she has ever worn, first of all, in head-to-toe detail. She is open about her foolishness in love - and every date she has ever been on is accompanied by the memory of what she was wearing. She cared about being a good actress and improving at her craft. She knew she was lucky to be "discovered" - she was the original "sweater girl" -

and she knew she needed to continue to get better if she would have a long career (and boy did she ever). She couldn't seem to stay out of trouble, though. You want to shout at the pages, "LANA, TRY BEING SINGLE FOR, LIKE, ONE SECOND. JUST TRY." But no, not Lana. She is all about love. And her clothes.

Again, if you're reading my words and assuming I'm making fun of all of this, you've totally got me wrong.

I love this book. I love every single word. There are plenty of "great" books out there that DON'T have an awesome sentence on each page - but this one does. Lana Turner and George Eliot, man, holding hands across the centuries.

Let's do an experiment. I will let the book fall open five times - and I will type the first thing I see each time. Sentence, paragraph, whatevs.

No cheating allowed. I promise to play by the rules.

Ready? Let's go.

Viewers of The Merry Widow may have noticed that all during the picture I wore long gloves or a very wide bracelet, or I carried a fur piece on my wrist. Filming of the picture began only a few days after my suicide attempt, and my slashed wrist remained bandaged for most of the shooting. No one at MGM seemed to doubt that my injury was an accident. I was bouncing back quickly, partly because of my natural resiliency. But I also had help. His name was Fernando Lamas.

That is an absolutely PERFECT paragraph. Beginning writers should study it.

Next.

I wore a full-length white fox coat and a silky white lace dress over a nude-colored slip. Before the ball a limousine drove us to the White House, and we filed into the room where Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats to the nation. The President sat behind a desk and greeted each person in turn. Fascinated, I studied his lined, handsome face and the marvelous grin I knew from the newsreels. As I approached I saw a look of recongition in his eyes. He didn't wait for an aide's introduction. He just extended his hand and said, "You are Miss Lana Turner." All I could say was, "Yes, Mr. President." He gave me a long look that seemed to take in everything.

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

Poor Liza (Minnelli) got twenty-one stitches in her leg, and her face was badly scraped from hitting the cement. The messy situation got worse when Sid Luft came home. He wanted to sue me, but Judy well knew that Liza had been sternly warned about the wall and the dog. As for Lex, he was so attached to Pulco that he refused to give him up, and in all fairness, he did have good reasons for wanting Pulco at the house. I'd been receiving some strange threatening letters, some of them worrisome enough to report to the police. And there had been that kidnap threat against Cheryl some years back. I no longer went out publicly as much as I had before, and when I did it would be to someone's home. Seclusion became important to me and Lex, and Acapulco appealed to us more and more.

Look, little Liza, Lana warned you about the wall and the dog, mkay?

Next:

Artie wasn't always surly. Sometimes he actually enjoyed life. One night there was an MGM bash at Earl Carroll's, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Artie played the clarinet in the show, and I performed a dance number from Two Girls on Broadway. Phil Silvers did a comedy turn, and since he had no date, he tagged along with us after the show. At Artie's insistence, we headed home. I made drinks and went off to change. When I came back, Artie and Phil were smoking what they called "reefers". I'd heard of marijuana, of course, but I'd never seen it before. It was associated mainly with jazz musicians. Artie and Phil offered me some, and I said no.

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

Our next stop was Rio, where we planned to arrive at Carnival time. I wasn't sorry to leave Buenos Aires. Argentina was torn by political strift. It was election time, and there were rough political rallies right in the plaza under our balcony. The Peronista guards would sweep into the crowd with their sabers drawn. It terrified and sickened me to see their battered victims, with blood streaming down their heads. Once, at three in the morning, someone threw a bomb into a service entrance of our hotel. The blast almost shook me and Sara out of our beds. For the rest of the night we sat up, terrified and shaking, in the living room of our suite. In Rio social life was far more pleasant. I had acquaintances there, who invited me to several posh parties. During Carnival the whole city throbbed with the seductive samba beat. We danced long and late. One night someone said, "Let's go into the streets!" Out there we were simply swept off into the crowds. Now it's forbidden, but at that time the men put a little perfumed ether on their handkerchiefs, which would be vaporized by the heat of their bodies. The air was sweet with intoxicating ether fumes. With that and the blaring wild music you just seemed to float on and on. In a seductive black satin halter dress, with flowers in my hair, I danced until dawn.

Of course you did, Lana. I wish I was there.

You know, I thought Don Delillo's supposed masterpiece Underworld was about 400 pages too long - but I wish Lana's book was 400 MORE pages long.

It's the lack of irony, like I mentioned - which gives it such a great zesty and ridiculous voice... and also the lack of self-consciousness. She does not come across as a dingbat, but she does paint herself in this way where you really can see her in all her self-dramatizing chaotic glory. It's self-serving, as all such books are ... but again - if she had laid down irony on top of her defensiveness, or even a sense of detachment or self-awareness- it would have been a terrible book. Here she is, and at times, it seems like she's putting her hands out up to heaven, shrugging at the reader, like, "How on earth can so much happen to one person?" (to paraphrase Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby) And I, the reader, looking on, feel like saying to her, "Lana, the reason so much happens to you is because you have atrocious taste in men and you leap right into intimacy without thinking: ' Hmmmm ... before I commit myself to this gentleman, let me ponder the ultimate question: will my daughter one day stab this man to death?' Just HOLD BACK a bit before you fall in love again, I beg of you Lana, please!!" But if she held back, she wouldn't be Lana, yo, so you just have to sit back and keep your mouth shut, shaking your head with fondness and yet also a bit of judgment. "Oh, Lana, Lana, there you go again ..."

I haven't even talked about her acting yet! Let me send you over to Alex's wonderful tribute piece - Lana Turner is one of her favorite actresses, and that's a wonderful post about why. Here is another insightful post about Lana Turner - a career deep and strange enough that it certainly deserves a second look.

Her star has faded a bit - she is now seen as a symbol of other things - but I've got to believe that someone whose career lasted that long (she may not have done a gazillion movies a year - but she worked steadily) had a hell of a lot of moxie, ambition, and ... maybe not smarts ... but survival skills. She started out as the "It Girl" because of how she looked in a sweater. "It Girls" are a dime a dozen. If you want to last beyond your big season of being the "It Girl", you need to have more going on than just looks, or luck. Will we ever have a Sienna Miller Blog-a-Thon day? Time will tell.

I am not saying I think Lana Turner is under-rated. I don't. I do think she might be remembered for the wrong reasons, and for those of you who haven't seen her big films, I suggest you go back and have a look. Because she has some damn fine moments when she is used well - when a director "gets" her - and I celebrate that part of her. I really like watching her act. It's a bunch of hoo-hah, really - breathy sleepy-eyed hoo-hah -but that's part of why I like it.

I think Turner is a great example of a woman whose personal life is what she is now remembered for, as opposed to her acting. I love it when people whine about how out of control celebrities are today. Seriously? TODAY they're out of control? Oh, really? Do you have any sense of history? Do you have any grasp on, oh, FACTS? Do you realize how much the studios controlled the publicity of their stars, so most of the really bad stuff was kept from the public? But also, gotta ask: it was better at WHAT point in history? The purer sweeter time of, oh, Fatty Arbuckle? The well-behaved proper time of, uhm, Lana Turner? Like THOSE times?

But oh well, some people just like to live in a fantasy that once upon a time things were BETTER than they are now, because then they always have something to bitch about!! But seriously, I do laugh sometimes when I hear that "now" celebrities are out of control. Dude. Google Lana Turner and check out what HER life was like, mkay? It makes it look like Lindsay Lohan was just blowing off some adolescent steam.

Lana Turner led one of the most exhausting public lives I can think of. I want to plead, Good GOD, woman, lie down!!

Or, you could give her the opposite advice as the wonderful Frank O'Hara does in his poem about her.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

(My friend Mitchell has actually done this piece as a dramatic monologue and it is so funny you stop being able to breathe by around line 6. Speaking of which, Ted just wrote a post on Frank O'Hara ...)

Great book. Compulsively readable, far better than many serious works of literature I know, and also a book you can keep going back to, over and over again. I first read it when I was 14 (and I was WAY too young for the salacious nature of much of it!) and have read it probably 6 or 7 times ever since.

So ... lie down, Lana, or get up, Lana, either way, we love you.

Here's an excerpt. I basically just let the book fall open and decided to excerpt whatever I saw first, because it was just too hard to choose.

I just love how she defends herself here, and then starts a new paragraph with 'But I did go out a lot." Again, I'm not making fun of her. I am truly delighted at how, in every moment, she appears to be truthful. Even if the truth of one moment totally contradicts the truth of the moment before. But then, after a paragraph about her going beyond the velvet rope to her table, blowing kisses to people, etc. - she takes the edge off of us thinking she takes herself too seriously by writing, "Silly, I guess, but fun."

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

Put down Don DeLillo and pick up Lana. DeLillo will be waiting for you when you're done. Lana's book is a must-read.

EXCERPT FROM Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

On New Year's Day, 1945, I became one of the most highly paid actresses in the world. My new contract paid me $4,000 a week, and by Hollywood ritual that meant it was time to buy a new home. I looked for a place in Bel-Air, a gracious section with handsome estates enclosed by Spanish-style adobe walls or ornate wrought-iron fences and sculptured hedges, and I found a lovely house hidden in the woods overlooking the ninth green of the Bel-Air Country Club. Sometimes golf balls smacked the windows or flew into the pool. Whenever I retrieved one I would fine the player a quarter for going out of bounds. It gives me a chuckle to remember those startled faces.

Now I was dating again. First it was Turhan Bey, an exotically handsome Turkish-Viennese actor. But when things turned serious, he introduced me to his mother, who seemed to dislike me on sight.

Once when I was dancing with Turhan at a party in Beverly Hills, Stephan appeared and tried to cut in. When I glanced at Turhan meaningfully he gallantly stepped aside to let Stephan take his place. I still wore Stephan's engagement ring, a three-carat diamond, which I'd had reset to my taste. Now Stephan told me he wanted it back.

"But it's been reset," I protested.

"I don't care. Give it back!"

He snatched my hand and yanked off the ring, then strode quickly away.

When Turhan saw me standing there, he asked me what had happened. I told him, then excused myself to recover. When I got back from the ladies' room, Turhan wasn't there, but everyone was rushing to the garden.

In the center of a knot of people were Turhan and Stephan, scuffling on the ground. the other guests pulled them apart before they could hurt each other. Thank goodness! But Stephan had dropped the ring and was searching frantically through the shrubbery.

The next day Anita May, who had given the party, called to say that her gardener had found the ring. I recovered it, but the story made the papers. The gossips inflated my connection with Turhan to the level of a grand passion. Those same busybodies linked my name to Rory Calhoun, Robert Hutton, and Frank Sinatra - the mention of Frank's name in this connection showed how little the gossips really knew about any of us. Yes, Frank had been a good friend for years, and I was close to his wife, Nancy. But the closest things to dates Frank and I enjoyed were a few box lunches at MGM. Despite our later differences of opinion about his relationship with Ava Gardner, I always found him warm and especially kind to me.

But I did go out a lot. The war had just ended, and the city was booming again. Affluence was in the air. Developers had bought up acres of land and dotted them with row upon row of small, brightly colored tract homes for returning servicemen. Almost overnight the orange groves and open spaces disappeared under the spreading blanket of suburbs, and the city got its first whiff of smog. But in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills set high in the Santa Monica Mountains, prewar glamour and opulence were reborn, with a modern flair. The magnificent homes were palaces of glass that let the light stream in, not the tile-floored haciendas or Tudor manors of the past. Light - that's my strongest impression of that postwar time. After th elong years of blackouts and conservation, the city was adazzle with blazing bulbs, brilliant and glittering and fun.

And the men were home. They seemed to catch your eye everywhere you went, like the first greening after a thaw. How I'd love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man. Ciro's was a favorite haunt. I'd walk up the steps and through the glass door, and pass the velvet rope that barred the less-fortunates. And the headwaiter would spring forward - "Ah, Miss Turner ..." and escort me in.

I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I'd head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I'd give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.

Ciro's was designed for dramatic entrances and exits because a long flight of stairs led down to the tables and dance floor. And at the top of the stairs - that's where the stars stopped, to let everyone see them come in. It was all part of the game. Everyone would stare, and you knew you were making an Entrance.

I'd usually be dressed in something clingy, black or white, sometimes gold, occasionally red. I'd wear diamonds and a fur of some kind draped over one shoulder. Often white fur, my favorite. Maybe ermine or silver fox, the fashionable furs at that time. Or sable. I had beautiful sables. I'd have jewels in my hair, or flowers, and every hair in place.

But talk about an Entrance! Hedy Lamarr holds the record for that. One Entrance she made at Ciro's is a vision I'll never forget.

Hedy was at the height of her beauty, with thick, wavy, jet-black hair. With that stunning widow's peak, her face was magnificent. We all looked up and there she was at the top of those stairs. She wore a cape of some kind up to her chin, and it swept down to the floor. I can't even remember the color of the cape, because all I saw was that incredible face, that magnificent hair - and a huge diamond. The most fabulous solitaire diamond on her forehead, just at the tip of her widow's peak. She was enough to make strong men faint.

How the hell did she keep that diamond on her forehead? Was it pasted on? You couldn't tell. Later, Sidney Guilaroff told me that he had taken jet-black wire, very fine, and woven it into Hedy's hair. He anchored it with a little spot of glue. But that diamond was absolutely real. It was breathtaking.

The Books: "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth" (Lana Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

You know, you can open up George Eliot's Middlemarch and find a gem of language on every page. Not an exaggeration. It's almost overwhelming that book, you want her to slow down ... because her genius is just too much, I am just a mere mortal, George, let me catch up! One of the things I like to do is just flip open Middlemarch to any page and read the first sentence that I see. It's amazing how often it's a really good one.

Well. Lana Turner's autobiography is the same way.

Is this the first time in the history of the planet that Lana Turner was compared to George Eliot? I hope so, because it's about time.

You literally cannot open this book without finding an awesome sentence. I'm not being sarcastic - although there is much to make fun of here as well. But why I think this book is so awesome is its complete and utter lack of irony (which is really quite refreshing) - not to mention its open-faced assumption that we will care about every detail. Of course we do, Lana! You're Lana Turner! Give us the dish! And boy does she ever. I suppose if you only looked at this book thru a cynical lens, you'd find it irritating and self-involved.

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

It IS self-involved. That is the REASON it is so good. Also, I have to ask: Why are you reading the autobiography of a famous film star and looking for calm reasonable detachment? That's YOUR problem.

She appears to remember every outfit she has ever worn, first of all, in head-to-toe detail. She is open about her foolishness in love - and every date she has ever been on is accompanied by the memory of what she was wearing. She cared about being a good actress and improving at her craft. She knew she was lucky to be "discovered" - she was the original "sweater girl" -

and she knew she needed to continue to get better if she would have a long career (and boy did she ever). She couldn't seem to stay out of trouble, though. You want to shout at the pages, "LANA, TRY BEING SINGLE FOR, LIKE, ONE SECOND. JUST TRY." But no, not Lana. She is all about love. And her clothes.

Again, if you're reading my words and assuming I'm making fun of all of this, you've totally got me wrong.

I love this book. I love every single word. There are plenty of "great" books out there that DON'T have an awesome sentence on each page - but this one does. Lana Turner and George Eliot, man, holding hands across the centuries.

Let's do an experiment. I will let the book fall open five times - and I will type the first thing I see each time. Sentence, paragraph, whatevs.

No cheating allowed. I promise to play by the rules.

Ready? Let's go.

Viewers of The Merry Widow may have noticed that all during the picture I wore long gloves or a very wide bracelet, or I carried a fur piece on my wrist. Filming of the picture began only a few days after my suicide attempt, and my slashed wrist remained bandaged for most of the shooting. No one at MGM seemed to doubt that my injury was an accident. I was bouncing back quickly, partly because of my natural resiliency. But I also had help. His name was Fernando Lamas.

That is an absolutely PERFECT paragraph. Beginning writers should study it.

Next.

I wore a full-length white fox coat and a silky white lace dress over a nude-colored slip. Before the ball a limousine drove us to the White House, and we filed into the room where Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats to the nation. The President sat behind a desk and greeted each person in turn. Fascinated, I studied his lined, handsome face and the marvelous grin I knew from the newsreels. As I approached I saw a look of recongition in his eyes. He didn't wait for an aide's introduction. He just extended his hand and said, "You are Miss Lana Turner." All I could say was, "Yes, Mr. President." He gave me a long look that seemed to take in everything.

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

Poor Liza (Minnelli) got twenty-one stitches in her leg, and her face was badly scraped from hitting the cement. The messy situation got worse when Sid Luft came home. He wanted to sue me, but Judy well knew that Liza had been sternly warned about the wall and the dog. As for Lex, he was so attached to Pulco that he refused to give him up, and in all fairness, he did have good reasons for wanting Pulco at the house. I'd been receiving some strange threatening letters, some of them worrisome enough to report to the police. And there had been that kidnap threat against Cheryl some years back. I no longer went out publicly as much as I had before, and when I did it would be to someone's home. Seclusion became important to me and Lex, and Acapulco appealed to us more and more.

Look, little Liza, Lana warned you about the wall and the dog, mkay?

Next:

Artie wasn't always surly. Sometimes he actually enjoyed life. One night there was an MGM bash at Earl Carroll's, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Artie played the clarinet in the show, and I performed a dance number from Two Girls on Broadway. Phil Silvers did a comedy turn, and since he had no date, he tagged along with us after the show. At Artie's insistence, we headed home. I made drinks and went off to change. When I came back, Artie and Phil were smoking what they called "reefers". I'd heard of marijuana, of course, but I'd never seen it before. It was associated mainly with jazz musicians. Artie and Phil offered me some, and I said no.

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

Our next stop was Rio, where we planned to arrive at Carnival time. I wasn't sorry to leave Buenos Aires. Argentina was torn by political strift. It was election time, and there were rough political rallies right in the plaza under our balcony. The Peronista guards would sweep into the crowd with their sabers drawn. It terrified and sickened me to see their battered victims, with blood streaming down their heads. Once, at three in the morning, someone threw a bomb into a service entrance of our hotel. The blast almost shook me and Sara out of our beds. For the rest of the night we sat up, terrified and shaking, in the living room of our suite. In Rio social life was far more pleasant. I had acquaintances there, who invited me to several posh parties. During Carnival the whole city throbbed with the seductive samba beat. We danced long and late. One night someone said, "Let's go into the streets!" Out there we were simply swept off into the crowds. Now it's forbidden, but at that time the men put a little perfumed ether on their handkerchiefs, which would be vaporized by the heat of their bodies. The air was sweet with intoxicating ether fumes. With that and the blaring wild music you just seemed to float on and on. In a seductive black satin halter dress, with flowers in my hair, I danced until dawn.

Of course you did, Lana. I wish I was there.

You know, I thought Don Delillo's supposed masterpiece Underworld was about 400 pages too long - but I wish Lana's book was 400 MORE pages long.

It's the lack of irony, like I mentioned - which gives it such a great zesty and ridiculous voice... and also the lack of self-consciousness. She does not come across as a dingbat, but she does paint herself in this way where you really can see her in all her self-dramatizing chaotic glory. It's self-serving, as all such books are ... but again - if she had laid down irony on top of her defensiveness, or even a sense of detachment or self-awareness- it would have been a terrible book. Here she is, and at times, it seems like she's putting her hands out up to heaven, shrugging at the reader, like, "How on earth can so much happen to one person?" (to paraphrase Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby) And I, the reader, looking on, feel like saying to her, "Lana, the reason so much happens to you is because you have atrocious taste in men and you leap right into intimacy without thinking: ' Hmmmm ... before I commit myself to this gentleman, let me ponder the ultimate question: will my daughter one day stab this man to death?' Just HOLD BACK a bit before you fall in love again, I beg of you Lana, please!!" But if she held back, she wouldn't be Lana, yo, so you just have to sit back and keep your mouth shut, shaking your head with fondness and yet also a bit of judgment. "Oh, Lana, Lana, there you go again ..."

I haven't even talked about her acting yet! Let me send you over to Alex's wonderful tribute piece - Lana Turner is one of her favorite actresses, and that's a wonderful post about why. Here is another insightful post about Lana Turner - a career deep and strange enough that it certainly deserves a second look.

Her star has faded a bit - she is now seen as a symbol of other things - but I've got to believe that someone whose career lasted that long (she may not have done a gazillion movies a year - but she worked steadily) had a hell of a lot of moxie, ambition, and ... maybe not smarts ... but survival skills. She started out as the "It Girl" because of how she looked in a sweater. "It Girls" are a dime a dozen. If you want to last beyond your big season of being the "It Girl", you need to have more going on than just looks, or luck. Will we ever have a Sienna Miller Blog-a-Thon day? Time will tell.

I am not saying I think Lana Turner is under-rated. I don't. I do think she might be remembered for the wrong reasons, and for those of you who haven't seen her big films, I suggest you go back and have a look. Because she has some damn fine moments when she is used well - when a director "gets" her - and I celebrate that part of her. I really like watching her act. It's a bunch of hoo-hah, really - breathy sleepy-eyed hoo-hah -but that's part of why I like it.

I think Turner is a great example of a woman whose personal life is what she is now remembered for, as opposed to her acting. I love it when people whine about how out of control celebrities are today. Seriously? TODAY they're out of control? Oh, really? Do you have any sense of history? Do you have any grasp on, oh, FACTS? Do you realize how much the studios controlled the publicity of their stars, so most of the really bad stuff was kept from the public? But also, gotta ask: it was better at WHAT point in history? The purer sweeter time of, oh, Fatty Arbuckle? The well-behaved proper time of, uhm, Lana Turner? Like THOSE times?

But oh well, some people just like to live in a fantasy that once upon a time things were BETTER than they are now, because then they always have something to bitch about!! But seriously, I do laugh sometimes when I hear that "now" celebrities are out of control. Dude. Google Lana Turner and check out what HER life was like, mkay? It makes it look like Lindsay Lohan was just blowing off some adolescent steam.

Lana Turner led one of the most exhausting public lives I can think of. I want to plead, Good GOD, woman, lie down!!

Or, you could give her the opposite advice as the wonderful Frank O'Hara does in his poem about her.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

(My friend Mitchell has actually done this piece as a dramatic monologue and it is so funny you stop being able to breathe by around line 6. Speaking of which, Ted just wrote a post on Frank O'Hara ...)

Great book. Compulsively readable, far better than many serious works of literature I know, and also a book you can keep going back to, over and over again. I first read it when I was 14 (and I was WAY too young for the salacious nature of much of it!) and have read it probably 6 or 7 times ever since.

So ... lie down, Lana, or get up, Lana, either way, we love you.

Here's an excerpt. I basically just let the book fall open and decided to excerpt whatever I saw first, because it was just too hard to choose.

I just love how she defends herself here, and then starts a new paragraph with 'But I did go out a lot." Again, I'm not making fun of her. I am truly delighted at how, in every moment, she appears to be truthful. Even if the truth of one moment totally contradicts the truth of the moment before. But then, after a paragraph about her going beyond the velvet rope to her table, blowing kisses to people, etc. - she takes the edge off of us thinking she takes herself too seriously by writing, "Silly, I guess, but fun."

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

Put down Don DeLillo and pick up Lana. DeLillo will be waiting for you when you're done. Lana's book is a must-read.

EXCERPT FROM Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

On New Year's Day, 1945, I became one of the most highly paid actresses in the world. My new contract paid me $4,000 a week, and by Hollywood ritual that meant it was time to buy a new home. I looked for a place in Bel-Air, a gracious section with handsome estates enclosed by Spanish-style adobe walls or ornate wrought-iron fences and sculptured hedges, and I found a lovely house hidden in the woods overlooking the ninth green of the Bel-Air Country Club. Sometimes golf balls smacked the windows or flew into the pool. Whenever I retrieved one I would fine the player a quarter for going out of bounds. It gives me a chuckle to remember those startled faces.

Now I was dating again. First it was Turhan Bey, an exotically handsome Turkish-Viennese actor. But when things turned serious, he introduced me to his mother, who seemed to dislike me on sight.

Once when I was dancing with Turhan at a party in Beverly Hills, Stephan appeared and tried to cut in. When I glanced at Turhan meaningfully he gallantly stepped aside to let Stephan take his place. I still wore Stephan's engagement ring, a three-carat diamond, which I'd had reset to my taste. Now Stephan told me he wanted it back.

"But it's been reset," I protested.

"I don't care. Give it back!"

He snatched my hand and yanked off the ring, then strode quickly away.

When Turhan saw me standing there, he asked me what had happened. I told him, then excused myself to recover. When I got back from the ladies' room, Turhan wasn't there, but everyone was rushing to the garden.

In the center of a knot of people were Turhan and Stephan, scuffling on the ground. the other guests pulled them apart before they could hurt each other. Thank goodness! But Stephan had dropped the ring and was searching frantically through the shrubbery.

The next day Anita May, who had given the party, called to say that her gardener had found the ring. I recovered it, but the story made the papers. The gossips inflated my connection with Turhan to the level of a grand passion. Those same busybodies linked my name to Rory Calhoun, Robert Hutton, and Frank Sinatra - the mention of Frank's name in this connection showed how little the gossips really knew about any of us. Yes, Frank had been a good friend for years, and I was close to his wife, Nancy. But the closest things to dates Frank and I enjoyed were a few box lunches at MGM. Despite our later differences of opinion about his relationship with Ava Gardner, I always found him warm and especially kind to me.

But I did go out a lot. The war had just ended, and the city was booming again. Affluence was in the air. Developers had bought up acres of land and dotted them with row upon row of small, brightly colored tract homes for returning servicemen. Almost overnight the orange groves and open spaces disappeared under the spreading blanket of suburbs, and the city got its first whiff of smog. But in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills set high in the Santa Monica Mountains, prewar glamour and opulence were reborn, with a modern flair. The magnificent homes were palaces of glass that let the light stream in, not the tile-floored haciendas or Tudor manors of the past. Light - that's my strongest impression of that postwar time. After th elong years of blackouts and conservation, the city was adazzle with blazing bulbs, brilliant and glittering and fun.

And the men were home. They seemed to catch your eye everywhere you went, like the first greening after a thaw. How I'd love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man. Ciro's was a favorite haunt. I'd walk up the steps and through the glass door, and pass the velvet rope that barred the less-fortunates. And the headwaiter would spring forward - "Ah, Miss Turner ..." and escort me in.

I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I'd head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I'd give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.

Ciro's was designed for dramatic entrances and exits because a long flight of stairs led down to the tables and dance floor. And at the top of the stairs - that's where the stars stopped, to let everyone see them come in. It was all part of the game. Everyone would stare, and you knew you were making an Entrance.

I'd usually be dressed in something clingy, black or white, sometimes gold, occasionally red. I'd wear diamonds and a fur of some kind draped over one shoulder. Often white fur, my favorite. Maybe ermine or silver fox, the fashionable furs at that time. Or sable. I had beautiful sables. I'd have jewels in my hair, or flowers, and every hair in place.

But talk about an Entrance! Hedy Lamarr holds the record for that. One Entrance she made at Ciro's is a vision I'll never forget.

Hedy was at the height of her beauty, with thick, wavy, jet-black hair. With that stunning widow's peak, her face was magnificent. We all looked up and there she was at the top of those stairs. She wore a cape of some kind up to her chin, and it swept down to the floor. I can't even remember the color of the cape, because all I saw was that incredible face, that magnificent hair - and a huge diamond. The most fabulous solitaire diamond on her forehead, just at the tip of her widow's peak. She was enough to make strong men faint.

How the hell did she keep that diamond on her forehead? Was it pasted on? You couldn't tell. Later, Sidney Guilaroff told me that he had taken jet-black wire, very fine, and woven it into Hedy's hair. He anchored it with a little spot of glue. But that diamond was absolutely real. It was breathtaking.

The Books: "Jimmy Stewart: A Biography" (Marc Elliot)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

I had misplaced this book and forgot about it - so even though we are now at "T" in the alphabet, I have to swoop back and include this book. I'm too OCD to let it slide.

Marc Elliot appears to be the new bigwig on the block, in terms of serious in-depth entertainment biographies. A couple of years ago, he came out with a detailed huge book about Cary Grant (Excerpt here), and he just came out with a book called Reagan: The Hollywood Years, which I am eager to read.

Here is what I think Elliot's gift is. He does not skimp on the movies themselves of his particular subject - he delves into the meaning of a career, rather than just its surface elements. So - what are the phases of Stewart's career? What did Capra bring out in him? What did Mann? What did Hitchcock? But I think his real gift (and I noticed this in the Cary Grant book too) is in breaking down for us, through meticulous research, all of the business decisions of the powers-that-be that made these men such giant stars (besides their talent, I mean). Elliot is brilliant on contracts and negotiations and the repercussions thereof. That stuff can be rather dry, especially for a fangirl like myself, but it's never dry with him. It becomes THE thing that sets his book apart from other books. Cary Grant had a precedent-breaking deal with a couple of studios - unheard-of at the time. He was basically freelance. How did he do that?? Elliot breaks it down for us, and makes us see just how prescient Grant was - he wasn't just lucky, he was smart - and he does the same thing here with Stewart. Stewart's agent got him a deal for the profits of the films he worked on - which catapulted him up into the highest echelon of salaries. He became a millionaire with that deal. Because the real money isn't in the salary you make as an actor. The REAL money is when you get a piece of the film itself. Actors nowadays all have such deals, it's part of being a star. You produce the film, or you help produce it - you negotiate for a portion of the gross profits. I remember when Jack Nicholson somehow got that kind of deal for himself when he played "The Joker" - not only did he get a portion of the film, but also a portion of all the memorabilia surrounding the film. It made front-page news at the time. That is a gargantuan sum. But back in the 30s and 40s, even though these people were huge stars, they were still, essentially, contract players. Now, naturally, they made a lot of money - but the deals of Stewart and Grant changed the industry. It was a prophecy of things to come, of the studio collapse, of all actors going freelance, and the result being that salaries skyrocketed. When Stewart got the deal for the profits of the film, every actor in Hollywood started pressing their agents to get them similar deals. The pressures on the studio were enormous. "If HE can have that, then I want it, too!"

I love this story that Quincy Jones tells, which is relevant. He and Grant were good friends. Grant came from a poverty-struck lower-class background, and Jones and he clicked on that level - Jones said something like, "The lower class in England was looked down upon like black people were in America - we understood each other." And once, he mentioned to Grant his theory of "horizontal money":

Sometimes I would get into a lot of mixed metaphors. The way I expressed things cracked Cary up because it was so un-British. For instance, I would say, 'I'm getting to the age where I've got to start making some more horizontal money.' He asked me what that meant. I explained, 'Well, when I'm up in the studio conducting, that's vertical money. But when you're at home watching TV and An Affair to Remember comes on, that's horizontal money.' Cary talked about that for years. He told all his friends.

The real money to be made is not the vertical money. That's just you WORKING for your living. But when you lie down to rest, and you STILL make money, then you're in the horizontal bracket, and you're then all set. Very few actors make horizontal money, although it's a little bit better now because of residuals. Although, let's be honest - those only really matter for the stars, the Bea Arthurs and the David Schwimmers and the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss who honestly never have to work again because of their residuals. My friend and I were recently laughing - her husband had a small part on The Sopranos, he appeared in one episode. He recently got a check - a CHECK - for eighteen cents. So that's what residuals are for your basic day-players - so that's not REALLY "horizontal money". My friend's husband was laughing like, "Do I CASH this? This is an insult!" Most actors, even successful ones, still have to hustle to sing for their supper. But people like Stewart and Grant saw the opportunity in that horizontal money - Grant was an independent spirit, he didn't even have an agent, for God's sake - he negotiated that deal for himself! In the 1930s! Unheard of. Stewart had a shark of an agent who did it all for him - but nevertheless there is a similarity in the two men's trajectories, in terms of horizontal money.

So Elliot is really really good on that level. Hollywood opens its secret doors of negotiations when you read him and you start to get a sense of how things actually work.

But he is also good, like I mentioned earlier, in describing the feel of a person's career. Not just "what happened", but what it MEANT. What was Jimmy Stewart's persona? How did it change? What did he mean to people? And how did THAT change? Elliot sometimes falls into the trap of analyzing Stewart's films in terms of how they fit in with Stewart's biography - and I'm not wacky about that because it seems to discount the creative spirit. Meaning, Elliot will say things like, "Stewart was probably attracted to the role because it showed a character who had unresolved issues with his father, and Stewart had those same issues." Uhm, not so fast. How about he was attracted to the role because it was a good part? Acting is NOT an exorcism of personal demons. Or, it can be - but that seems to me to be a byproduct, not a goal. Stewart may have been releasing some demons in some of his best parts (it is apparent that he was) - but the choice to DO the role is often more complex (or simple) than: "Let me work on this because I went through the same thing ..." Acting can be rather mysterious, especially for those who have a gift for it. You don't always know WHY you are attracted to something. It may just feel like a good role and then in retrospect you realize how much it dovetails with your own experience. I'm not saying Elliot is wrong - it just becomes too simplistic at times.

Regardless, his analysis of the development of Stewart's career was really interesting and although I have always loved Stewart, I did not know a lot of his story. Much of this was new to me. I've seen most of his great movies and love him quite a bit, but I didn't know about the subtle change in him over the years, from naive idealist to dark torment ... or I noticed the change from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Vertigo but never really thought much about it. Jimmy Stewart was not a sex symbol. Women loved him, but they wanted to mother him. His early roles show that. He has a slow delivery of his lines, deliberate, he doesn't waste his energy. He doesn't push. He was a leading man, but not like Gary Cooper was a leading man, or Cary Grant. He had something different going on.

Capra illuminated the idealist, the man willing to almost destroy himself in pursuit of an idea, a goal - a shining martyr to America ... but how fascinating - you never could have predicted this: Anthony Mann saw something else in Stewart after WWII - and it probably saved his career. Stewart in a Western?

This now seems so obvious, because he made so many good ones - but back in the early 40s that was not the case. Stewart was a small-town guy, totally present-day, a shambling slow-talking sweetheart, maybe a little too naive - but not idiotically so. Mann saw that Stewart could bring a cold intellectual quality to a role, there was something in him that was NOT passionate - and while in certain roles that made him the sweet man that he was, put into another context it could be quite threatening. Mann revived Stewart's career and gave it new life. It's interesting to consider that so many of Stewart's movies that are now seen as classics were not hits at the time. It's A Wonderful Life flopped. Vertigo didn't flop, but it wasn't a success. Stewart was one of those actors lucky enough to live long enough to see the development of television totally revive his career - he was in his twilight years when It's a Wonderful Life started its unstoppable juggernaut on holiday television, and it catapulted him back up into the stratosphere. Same with the film nuts of the 70s and 80s - famous people now - Scorsese and the like - who saw the depth and breadth of his work and ran film festivals of the films he did with Hitchcock or Mann. Stewart did not die in obscurity, only to be re-discovered with the advent of cable television and TCM. It's a Wonderful Life on television made him a huge star all over again.

I know there are so many great moments in Jimmy Stewart's long and illustrious career, but I have to say - that that phone call scene in It's a Wonderful Life is my favorite bit of all. You just ache watching it. So so good.

Elliot is also very interesting on Jimmy Stewart's experiences in WWII and how it changed him forever. Here's a really nice tribute post about Stewart as a pilot - very inspiring (and that looks to be a really nice site, in general. I've been scrolling through his archives and I am very impressed and moved). Jimmy Stewart, post WWII, was darker and more tormented than he had been before. Scorsese writes:

If the prewar Stewart stood for something essentially American, the postwar Stewart stood for something truly universal. It's difficult to think of another American star who remade his own image so thoroughly, or so bravely.

It's a Wonderful Life came out after WWII, and it was thought it would be a huge hit, that the American populace would respond lovingly to its message, after so many years of fear and hardship. But that was not the case. Films after WWII got darker, more overtly political and paranoid, film noir became the next thing, and home and hearth were definitely not what the audiences were responding to. VERY interesting. Stewart realized that after the flop of It's a Wonderful Life and looked about for something to revive him, a new path, something different.

It was directors like Mann or Hitchcock who allowed him to express all of this new stuff - even though he didn't appear in war pictures. Stewart, after WWII, refused to ever appear as a soldier on film. There might have been one or two pictures where he caved on this stated principle of his - but in general, he did not want to be in a movie that depicted war, or glorified it. He had had it. He was a staunch lifelong Republican, he was proud of his service, and he was also proud of his son for serving (his son ended up dying in Vietnam, which shattered Stewart) - but he didn't want to participate in any way in films that glorified war. So he didn't. He also never spoke about his experiences (although the tributes given to him by men who served with him are eloquent and very moving), and whatever it was that had changed him remained private - but we can see the result in the films following WWII. Elliot analyzes the difference in the persona, pre- and post- and I hadn't really thought about it before, but you can really really see it in the films. Thank goodness Stewart had directors who saw something in him other than the aw-shucks idealist, because his career would have been short and boring otherwise. He's wonderful in romantic comedies - I love him in the sweetness of those old movies - but Hitchcock, in the same way he did with Cary Grant, saw something else in Stewart. And look at how different the two men are. You can't really picture Stewart in To Catch a Thief and it's hard to imagine Cary Grant in Vertigo. Hitchcock was brilliant in his perception at what was beneath the glitter in these two huge stars. Hitchcock kept coming back to Stewart. He was honing his own idea of the man, and you can see that in the development of the pictures they made together.

Fascinating.

Jimmy Stewart is a great American actor, and it was really fun for me to get to know him as a person a little bit better. I admire him even more now. I don't think his longevity was an accident. I think he was a practical man, who thought practically about his choices as an actor, and was willing (especially in things like Vertigo) to show himself as weak, human and conflicted. This is not the case of most giant male stars. They get more cautious as they get older (phone for Robert DeNiro, a call for Robert DeNiro) - not Stewart. He got braver ... and braver ... and braver ... and braver ...

Remarkable.

Here's an excerpt from the book about the byzantine negotiations that went in to the making of Philadelphia Story. It shows Marc Elliot's gift for making clear and real the contractual issues and back-and-forth that happens when getting ready to do a movie.

EXCERPT FROM Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

In 1939, Cukor was then hired by Katharine Hepburn to make a movie out of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, a project she and Howard Hughes, her secret investor (and lover), had commissioned Barry to write for her and had taken to Broadway in an attempt to reestablish her popularity. Hayward, meanwhile, who had navigated Hepburn out of her free-fall and anticipated a major comeback with the film version of her smash-hit Broadway vehicle, looked to play the role of fixer for Jimmy as well by getting him a role in what was shaping to be on the most anticipated movies of 1940. If anything could save Jimmy's career, Hayward figured, it was The Philadelphia Story.¹

Not that getting the film made was all that easy. Despite The Philadelphia Story's soaring success on stage that made it the talk of the 1939 Broadway season, its New York-based cast of actors and actresses - Joseph Cotten as C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord's (Hepburn's) divorced first husband, Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist; and Shirley Booth as Macaulay's wisecracking sidekick, Elizabeth Embrie - failed to impress Hollywood when the studios came looking to buy the rights for a film version. Nobody wanted Cotten, Heflin, Booth, and especially Hepburn. When Selznick initially wanted to buy the property as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, Hepburn adamantly refused to sell to him. When MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford, Hepburn again said no. When Warner Bros. wanted it for Ann Sheridan, ditto. When independent film maker Samuel Goldwyn was willing to take Hepburn to get the rights to the play, but only if Gary Cooper were her co-star and William Wyler directed, Hepburn flatly turned him down. She then made it clear to one and all: either George Cukor directed her in the film version of The Philadelphia Story or there was not going to be a movie version.

Finally, Louis B. Mayer put an offer on the table that Hepburn liked - $175,000 for the rights, $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord, and George Cukor at the helm. Mayer envisioned Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy (whom Hepburn had not yet met), or Robert Taylor in the role of C.K. Dexter Haven, and in the role of the gossip columnist Macaulay Connor (as a favor to Hayward, after the agent suggested to Mayer he could make the deal happen), James Stewart.

Gable, Tracy, and Taylor all turned down the film, presumably because they each felt it was still too risky a career move to star opposite box-office dud Hepburn. (Besides, Gable was already looking ahead to play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind and didn't want to work with Cukor, anyway, who was gay, and who the homophobic Gable believed favored filming female stars over their male co-stars.)²

Jimmy's reactio to being offered the role of Macaulay Connor was, on the other hand, one of pleasant surprise. "When I first read the script," he said later on, "I thought I was being considered for that fellow engaged to Hepburn. But as I read it, I thought to myself, ooh, that reporter part [Connor] is a good one. I'll be happy to play it."

Unfortunately for Jimmy, Grant wanted to play Connor rather than the part he had been offered, of Lord's ex-husband Dexter Haven, believing, although it was essentially a supporting role rather than the male lead, it was better written and funnier. However, as far as Cukor and Hepburn were concerned, Grant had to be her romantic co-star. In the context of the film's re-worked script, so as not to impede too much on the film's romantic track, the role of Connor was reduced to little more than a foil to Grant's star turn as Tracy's disgruntled but still-in-love, once-and-future husband.³

Stewart accepted the role of Connor without hesitation, even after he learned from Hayward how much more money Grant and Hepburn were being paid. Grant, four years older than Stewart and with a far more established screen presence, had become the first actor to successfully overcome the hitherto-ironclad studio salary system in 1936 by not renewing his original five-year deal with Paramount. Instead he signed two nonexclusive multiple-picture deals with Columbia and RKO, and reserved the right to negotiate his fees and percentages on a per-film basis. When Mayer offered him The Philadelphia Story, he agreed to sign on with two conditions. The first was that he be paid $137,500 - twice what Hepburn was getting, figuring correctly that she would make her money on the back end if the film proved a hit. The second was that he receive top billing, to which Hepburn also agreed.

For Mayer, it was a sweet deal, especially considering that for all he was paying for Hepburn and Grant, he had Jimmy under a tight financial rein. He was paying him $3,000 a week, which meant that for the five weeks the film was in production, from July 5 through August 14, Jimmy would earn a total of $15,000. Although he was not happy about the discrepancy in salaries, he also knew he was in no position to complain and said nothing. But he wouldn't forget either when, two years down the line, it would be time to renew his own contract with the studio.

¹ Generally credited with resurrecting Hepburn's career, Cukor always claimed to have "discovered" Cary Grant, although Grant had made twenty movies before Sylvia Scarlett, and had developed something of a name for himself playing opposite Marlene Dietrich for Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) and opposite Mae West two times, in Lowell Sherman's She Done Him Wrong (1933) and Wesley Ruggles's I'm No Angel (1933). In 1954, Cukor, at producer Sid Luft's urging, performed another female career resurrection a la Hepburn, this time for Judy Garland, against Warner Bros.' wishes, after she had been released by her contract at MGM, by casting her as the female lead in A Star Is Born.

² Cukor was hired to direct Gone With the Wind, but was quickly fired at Gable's insistence, replaced by his friend, macho film veteran Victor Fleming.

³ When Grant went to Hepburn to enlist her help to get him the part of Connor, she assured him he could have the role if he really wanted it, but if he were smart, he would listen to Cukor and stick with Haven, a sure-thing Oscar for whatever actor played him. If there was one thing the Oscar-less Grant wanted more than the part of Connor, it was a gold statue from the Academy. Always unsure of himself when it came to casting, Grant went against his own doubting instincts and followed Hepburn's advice, leaving the role of Connor to Stewart. Cukor assured Grant he had made the right choice.

The Books: "Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles" (Kathleen Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles, by Kathleen Turner (with Gloria Feldt)

I forget sometimes that Body Heat was Kathleen Turner's debut. How is that possible? Her performance is so strong, so suggestive of the entire history of film noir and femme fatales - it has its own specificity yet it also references every bad dame ever to stroll across celluloid ... She is smokin' hot, and she knows how to use it, but it's more of a long low smoulder than anything more flashy. You ache watching her. The movie is through Bill Hurt's eyes, so that's appropriate. This is a man who smashes through a window just because she's standing there. He MUST have her. Turner walks that line in her performance like an old pro. Another actress would have overdone the sexual-ness, being little more than a cat in heat, and missed that it is the SMOULDER that needs to be there, the long slow boil that will drive a man mad. That's hard to do. Lauren Bacall does it in To Have and Have Not. It requires the ability to be still, to hold back, to have it all be in the eyes.

It was Turner's debut. The mind boggles. In her book, which came out last year, she writes a lot about that shoot, and what it was like for her. She was a stage actress, living in New York. Film-making was a total unknown thing to her. She had done some extra work on a soap opera, I think - that was her only experience in front of a camera. Amazing. So she learned on the job. Most people learn on the job with smaller roles first. Not her. She was learning on the job while playing a lead. That required full body nudity. She had a good head on her shoulders, and it's very interesting to read her version of events, her process. She was such a newbie. The fact that a whole morning would be spent filming a closeup of her fingers tapping on the counter blew her mind ... and she was such a theatre person, she would be thinking, "God, you would never see such a thing on stage ... THIS is what film can give you ..." But still. You never see what a newbie she is in that performance.

Her salary for Body Heat was $30,000. Afterwards, before it came out, she went back to New York and started waitressing again. Her agent and the studio wanted to hold Turner back - didn't want her to be in anything else that might dilute the impact of Body Heat. Now that is a hell of a risk to take. What if Body Heat had flopped? That means she would have stepped out of the business for almost a year - which you just can't do, especially not when you're a young hot woman. You have ZERO time to make your mark ... but Turner, always one for taking risks - you really get that in her book - said, "Okay, cool, I won't do anything until Body Heat comes out." Good thing she didn't because it was like she had come from out of nowhere - this sultry knowing ice-cool yet boiling-hot blonde ... where did SHE come from?? It intensified her impact. But still: remember it was a risk. $30,000 may sound like a lot for one job, but it's really not. Because let's say you made, oh, $5,000 the year before as an actress - in small parts or theatre roles - and then you supplemented your yearly income by waitressing or teaching or whatever. Much of that $30,000 would disappear instantly, already going to pay overdue bills from your years of living below the poverty-line (income-wise, I mean) ... and that's what happened with Turner. She was waitressing in New York, after filming Body Heat, and people would ask her what she was up to, and she'd say, "Yeah, I did this movie ... it hasn't come out yet though." She was about to become a huge star.

I happen to love her in Romancing the Stone. That's another role where she had to, in her performance, reference other performances - it's a genre, a well-known style - the adventure movie, sure, but in the style of old serials, mixed with the delicious 1940s Howard Hawks gender wars with back-and-forth repartee between worthy foes who fight and fuck, basically ... This is not your straight drama or straight comedy. It's a parody, a spoof - as well as a movie that works on its own merits. (Can you tell I love it?) But what I'm trying to get at is, yet again, Turner was playing a reference-point - a certain KIND of part - same as she did in Body Heat, only now she totally switched it up and played the uptight-yet-romantic woman who is totally undone and frazzled and turned on by her encounter with this wild man. You know, the librarian who takes off her glasses. Nothing - NOTHING - would prepare you for Kathleen Turner's versatility from Body Heat. It's really rather amazing. I believe that if she had stayed playing hot temptresses her career would have been about 6 years long. But immediately following Body Heat, she started switching it all up - The Man with Two Brains, Romancing the Stone. Now what, to me, all of this really reveals - is Turner's love for camp. She "gets" it. It's not just a surface imitation - it's an embodiment of a certain style, and the campier the better. Body Heat, seen in this light, could be taken as one of the best camp performances of all time. I actually think that's what Sharon Stone was up to in Basic Instict - ridiculous film, but a deliciously campy performance - which I wrote about here - scroll down to the picture of Stone. I wrote:

I thought Stone gave one of the campiest (in the best way) most specific and fantastic performances of that entire decade. I look at it not as reality - or like she was trying to play a real person - I saw it as high camp - a nod to Jane Greer and Barbara Stanwyck and all the devious film-noir femme fatales. No wonder she became a star. I know she's nuts - but that was a star performance and she was NOT a star when she gave it. That takes balls. Well-deserved success, in my opinion.

It was great to see Turner and Michael Douglas again in War of the Roses - another campy romp. So much fun. They were great together.

There's a BIG-ness to Kathleen Turner. Subtlety is not her strong suit. In a way, she is difficult to cast because of that, but she has been very lucky. Her sex appeal was enormous, and that wasn't an accident (she writes a lot about that in her book) - she worked at it. She describes it as "turning on a tap". She has her insecurities like anyone, and getting naked in front of an entire crew was nerve-wracking (although crews are notoriously the most professional types around - they've seen it all ... they know how to be respectful and create a safe space for the actors to do what they have to do.) But Turner said that she would have her moments, during filming of Body Heat when the cameras were on, and the crew were basically hanging off the balcony holding lights and booms - when she felt like she was in the Coliseum, gladiators battling it out - only it was her sexuality that she had to show. In between takes, she would go back to her trailer and weep. She didn't feel degraded, she makes that very clear - but showing that kind of energy is scary, and usually it's done privately - your husband or your boyfriend gets to see it - and even then it might be nervewracking to let the cat out of the bag. But to do so take after take, in front of a large crowd, was a "raw" experience (her word), and yet she realized very early on that that would be her stock in trade. That was what she had to offer, and it set her apart from other actresses. She wasn't just sexy. She was hot, and when she turned on that tap, people went nuts. She managed to negotiate that aspect of herself very gracefully, I think - and here she is, in her 50s, still trying to negotiate it. Because you see Turner now, and she's heavy (although still gorgeous) - and the memory of that slim burning flame of a woman is still in all of our brains ... a painful thing for many actresses. People can be unforgiving. They don't want to see their sex bombs get older. Turner has certainly experienced that in her life. Not to mention her health problems, her drinking, and her battle with rheumatoid arthritis.

But we don't stop being sexual beings just because we're older (hopefully) - and Turner has been courageous enough to continue to explore that aspect of herself - now on Broadway rather than in films - in The Graduate as Mrs. Robinson (which I saw - not a very good show, but she was a lot of fun and the only one up on that stage who knew how to act in the THEATRE) - and then, spectacularly, as Martha in the highly acclaimed revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I saw that production and it was a high watermark for me, in terms of live performance. She was unbelievable. Her performance stayed with me for days. Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens was another high watermark for me. I'm trying to think of more - there aren't many. When I was in Ireland as a 12 year old girl, we went to see Ibsen's Doll's House at the Abbey and whoever that Irish actress was playing Nora - she was so blazingly good that I still remember some of her stage business and blocking so many years later. The scene where she desperately dances the tarantella to stop her husband from going to the mailbox? I have goosebumps right now typing this. That woman was out of this world. Acting rarely gets that good. Let's see, who else. I saw Bill Pullman do Edward Albee's The Goat on Broadway - and while I always liked Pullman I hadn't really realized how damn good he was until I saw him onstage. He was fantastic. And that is a hard play. An upper-class man falls in love with a goat that he sees during a drive in the country. This isn't a joke. He looks in that goat's eyes and sees a sexy kindred spirit. He hides his affair from his wife (played beautifully by Mercedes Ruehl) for a while until he can no longer stand it and comes clean. The play was uproariously funny but why it was funny was that Pullman played it all straight. He REALLY was in love, and his heart was torn to shreds because of it. That play could so have fallen flat on its face, but he was so damn good. I haven't forgotten it. Swoosie Kurtz in House of Blue Leaves was a high watermark for me, too. But although I've seen much good theatre, much that I really love - those performances that burn their way into your psyche - are few and far between.

Kathleen Turner as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the most powerful pieces of live acting I have ever seen. I saw it the week it opened, I think - it was very early on in the run - but I have friends who saw it later in the run and said it was just as intense, just as raw. Ted saw it (am I getting this memory right, Ted??) and as the audience left the theatre, Ted was following behind two women. The crowd dispersed down the sidewalk, and Ted found himself still behind those same two women. Half a block away from the theatre, one of the women suddenly buckled over, and burst into hysterical sobs. A delayed reaction from the play. She and her friend stood out of the way of the flow of traffic, and as Ted passed by, the woman was still out of control, sobbing. By the end of that play, you have been put through the wringer. Not just Turner was great - everyone was great - and Turner was just magnificent in that ensemble setting.

Here's my review of the play.

The play is obviously funny. I laugh out loud when I read the script. Turner got a laugh on almost every line - she got laughs where I didn't see laughs. Her delivery was superb. It was JUICY, rich, bitchy, tragic - such a good performance. And then in the last scene of the play, where the secret comes out - she falls apart. Her work was so stunningly real that I couldn't believe that what she had done was actually part of the script, and when I got home, I pulled out the script to see if she had deviated, or if what she had done was actually on the page. And it was. This is the greatest compliment to an actress I can think of. When George comes out with the secret, Martha falls to her knees and her line is, "Oh no!" Now how does one play that? How does one go about playing such a moment? What exactly does one work on?

Meryl Streep tells a great story about the filming of the "choice" moment in Sophie's Choice. It goes a long way towards explaining her "process" (which is good, because she sure as hell can't explain it!). She said that she glanced at the script once, before filming, skipped her eyes over the scene, and never looked at it again until the day of filming. She didn't work on it, or agonize over it. She knew what would be required of her, and with just one glance-over she knew it would rip her heart out - so she didn't think about it at all until the moment came to film it. A moment like that, if your talent is fluid and accessible enough, plays itself. But it does require that you live it. You can't "phone in" a moment like that. A good actress knows when she has to work and when she doesn't. You work on the right things, you don't waste your energy. Streep didn't waste her energy worrying about that scene, knowing, in her heart, that when the time came to film it - her sense of reality and identification and horror would have no choice but to come flowing out.

And that's what I saw when I saw Kathleen Turner fall to her knees and call out, like a character from a Greek tragedy, "Oh, no!" It was a cry of the soul, all that character's grief and loss was in it - the grief of the ages. An amazing moment of live theatre and I still couldn't believe that that "Oh no" was ever stark words on the page because Turner so made it come to life. It was unbearable to watch. It's like when cameras and microphones are shoved into the faces of people who have just lost everything in a fire, flood, tornado. Their lives are ruined. They are bereft. "How do you feel?" shout the reporters. Watching them in their pain feels intrusive, like we should leave them alone - an animal slinking off to the woods to lick its wounds. Turner was a wounded animal in that moment, howling out her pain, and it was embarrassing. I LOVE being embarrassed like that in the theatre, it happens so rarely. Sometimes you're just embarrassed because the play sucks, but embarrassment like what I felt in that last scene of Virginia Woolf comes close to being a truly divine experience. It is the meaning of catharsis.

Turner's book is honest, ballsy, and probably made her some enemies. She tells secrets. But not just on others - she tells secrets on herself, too. But her portrait of William Hurt during Body Heat is complex, she's not afraid to describe their conflicts. He was Mr. Method Man at the time and was really put off by the fact that Turner would be joking around with the crew moments before filming. He didn't get that that was her process - that she didn't want to expend her energy before the camera was rolling. He was annoyed. Turner describes the conflicts straight - you don't get the sense that she holds a grudge, she and Hurt are still good friends - but she has nothing to lose from being really honest. The book is honest as well about her drinking, and how much she came to need it.

And one of the other things that was amazing to me about her performance in Virginia Woolf was how physical it was - dancing, sashaying, falling over the couch, sitting on the floor - and Turner lives in almost constant physical pain from her arthritis. She did what she needed to do to be able to get through the run of that show without hurting herself - but when I think of her physical limitations and remember her falling to her knees, arms outstretched in horror, screaming, "Oh no" tears come to my eyes.

Good for her, man. Good for her.

I have chosen an excerpt from her book about how she campaigned to play Martha. I did not know the backstory to that production - that it was Turner who really made the whole thing happen, basically just by saying over and over to the powers-that-be, "I must play this part. I must play this part." There is a time to be humble, and then there is a time to be bold. "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." When you are pushing Edward Albee to allow you to bring out a production of a show he has not allowed performed in New York in 30 years, that is NOT the time to be humble. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.

I remember reading Ben Brantley's review in The NY Times (I wrote about it here) - the one she excerpts so proudly below (and rightly so) - and it was right after reading his review that I ordered tickets. Immediately. "I have to see this."

A funny thing: Turner had read the play in college and was blown away by it. It awakened something in her. She was 20 years old. She knew, "I HAVE to play this part someday." She had it in her head as a goal that she would play it before she turned 50. And I am very interested in how she made it her own. It's not an easy thing to do. It's like making Stanley Kowalski your own. And in many ways, an actor - when faced with that - has to say, "NO. MY version will be THIS ..." It requires a rejection of what has gone before. Not easy to do, especially with these roles that have been indelibly portrayed by others ... it's like you need to give yourself permission to do it your way.

She determined, at the ripe age of 20, that she would play that part when she was 50.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Kathleen Turner, opened on Broadway in March 2005, almost a year after her 50th birthday. She made her deadline!

EXCERPT FROM Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles, by Kathleen Turner (with Gloria Feldt)

I went about getting the role of Martha step by step, because I found her character so compelling from the very first time I read the play. I suppose I chose age fifty as my goal with the idea that she would be past childbearing age. Because the truth is, the play is not really a tragedy unless you know that Martha will never be able to have a child. If she's young enough that it would be possible for her still to hope for a child, then her character is not as deeply tragic as it could, should be. So I had fifty set in my mind. In this day and age, we think in terms of in vitro and other variations on the usual way of becoming pregnant. And we value women for attributes other than motherhood. But I think about Martha in 1960, when the play was set. Life was so different for women then, so much more restricted.

She is intelligent, ambitious, energetic. As she confesses, she worships her father, who was the president of the university. She so desires to please him. Her father has crippled her by not seeing who she is or what she has to offer. She had briefly married "the lawn mower", as they referred to the gardener at the boarding school she attended; that made her a damaged person to her father. If it were today, she could have aspired to be a university president herself, or to some other career of her choosing. That would have given her life a whole new purpose, a whole new meaning. But it's 1960, so her ambitions had to be channeled, funneled, achieved by a man - her father before she was married and thereafter, her husband.

As much as she and George love each other and always have, it's been a terrible disappointment to her that he has shared none of her ambitions and certainly will not be the heir to her father's presidency. After twenty-five years, George is still an associate professor. You have to work hard to fail that much.

And without children, what does she have? She gets to be on committees of faculty wives, to have a spring Easter egg hunt or a Christmas party or crap like that, which means nothing to her. She doesn't have any standing other than as her father's daughter or as her husband's wife. She's not a mother, can't be a baby maker, so she doesn't have that title of respect. Today, we women tend to have more options, not fewer, as we get older. Martha had almost none as she approached her fifties. This time of life that to me is so freeing, to Martha must have been terribly stifling.

So she sits in the empty house day after day and she starts drinking. Which I think many would do, frankly, in that situation. I think I would if i were sitting around with all that ability but no way to see that I could do something fruitful with it, or do something that used my abilities or challenged my mind. It would be dreadful. Anyone would feel defeated or might overeat or drink or do drugs.

Perhaps some exceptional women would have found another private outlet such as writing that they could control on their own. But I think that would be the exception and that they would have been seen as abnormal by the rest of society. Martha chafes at the irrational boundaries, but not in a political way. Her behavior has no boundaries. She has no limits physically or vocally. She just throws herself around without any thought as to the proper behavior.

Poor woman, I started out feeling very angry with her and quite disgusted, and I thought, Oh, stop it! Pull yourself together - this is rubbish. But then more and more I began to empathize with her. This happens to me often with characters. I play so many awful ones. They turn out to be more interesting than the good girls. You always know what a good girl is going to do. You never know what a bad girl is going to do. It's much more fun.

I didn't see the whole film and I've never seen a stage production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Knowing always that I wanted to do Martha, I would never willingly want to have someone else's performance in my head. But in my readings of it, I always thought it was extremely funny. I saw big laughs. I never understood why no one spoke of it that way. I like a hard-edged humor, and that's definitely Virginia Woolf to me. The little I saw of the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor film I disliked immensely, but I think that's because it was performed with acceptance of the culture of the time rather than a questioning of it. It seemed to me that their George and Martha were just two drunks screaming at each other and tearing each other apart for a night. I didn't understand this at all. Because my perception reading the play had been so very different.

With most characters, I find I go through stages where I truly dislike them, and then I start to find the reasons for their behavior - then I start to have sympathy for them and then empathy, and then I feel they're totally justified. Somebody says, "How could she do that?"

Because she had to, okay?

And I had to play Martha.

Fear tries to overtake me when I am between jobs. I had just finished the Broadway run of The Graduate and was looking anxiously to what I would do next. I am inclined to try to overcome fear by jumping right into its face, to do that which I am afraid of doing. I decided to ask directly for what I wanted most - to play Martha.

By the time I was forty-eight, I was on a comfortable standing with most of the major Broadway producers. I'd done enough work that was very good so I could speak with any of them if I wanted to. I set out to get the role I'd been coveting since I was twenty.

Liz McCann has been Edward Albee's producer for years. He doesn't allow anyone else to produce his plays. So I had to get to Liz. Fortunately, she's a great friend of the Nederlanders', who own theaters in which Albee's plays have been produced, and Jimmy Nederlander Jr. is a great friend of mine. I asked Jimmy and his fiancee, Margo MacNabb, also a dear friend, to set up a dinner with Liz and Jay and me. Just social, you know.

During the course of the evening, I told Liz that I wanted Virginia Woolf. "I want Martha," I said. And Liz said, "Well, I don't think that's going to happen." Edward had not allowed the play to be performed in New York since 1975. Liz told me he didn't express any desire to do it; he'd had some readings over the last few years with other actresses but had not approved any of them. And career-wise, he was still writing new plays. The Goat had come out that year. He didn't want to be known just for his old material. All of which was completely understandable.

I pressed on. "Yes, but you have no idea how well I would do this. I really need - no, you really need me to do this." "No, no, no, no" was her response.

I kept after Liz for weeks after that. I want to talk to Edward. I want to meet with Edward. I want to see him. Finally she set up a lunch and the three of us got together. This was before the presidential election in 2004. Edward and I are on the same side politically, and we share a great number of concerns. It was a very interesting, challenging conversation over lunch. The man is absolutely brilliant. We never even got to the play; we just talked politics and everything that goes with that. But I'm told that I became Martha during the course of the lunch.

Finally, as we were leaving the restaurant, Edward said, "All right, what do you want?" I said, "I want to read Martha."

When I met with Edward after that, I said, "Look, I'm funny and we'll get a funny George. I think the dark humor in the play has never been realized." He said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "No, I don't think anybody's seen it created as the comedy it could and should be." He was skeptical but said, "Oh, fine, right."

So what did I want, he asked again. Again I said I wanted a reading. We agreed to put together the reading.

Then we started desperately thinking of who we would get as George. Bill Irwin's name came up and I thought, Oh, that's brilliant. He is a great comedian and an inspired clown, and talk about your timing - that boy has got it. Yeah, he's got it. He has the clear, clear intelligence that needs to be demonstrated by George. And he'd just played in Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in London for a time. I thought, Oh, this is a stunning idea. There were many other leading actors who wanted this reading, but once Bill's name came up, that was it for me. I said, "Yes, we've got to get him in here."

Next I took the extra step to make sure my own reading would be the best it could possibly be. I got together with Anthony Page, the very talented British director who has done many of Albee's plays, and he worked with us before we did the reading. Anthony later said he thought I looked like Martha, strong and somewhat plain, and unpretentious, as though I'd really lived. Ha! Is that a compliment? At any rate, working with Anthony in advance of the reading was a real plus in my preparation.

When we did our read-through, Edward was there along with the director, the producers, and a number of other people. Edward started laughing soon after we began. And let me tell you something: he doesn't laugh easily.

Now, everyone can see that in this production, there are huge laughs throughout the first act, every three or four lines. In the second act, there are fewer, and the third act, fewer still. But even in the most difficult parts, Albee sets up big laughs that previous productions have not generally made the most of. Even at the very end, when Martha says, "Show me the telegram," and George says, "I ate it." My God, it's a shock laugh, yes. But the physical action of laughing releases a great deal of tension in everyone. It allows you as an actor to build the tension back up again and to keep the audience with you.

That humor is a part of the characters' deep, deep hurt. They make each other laugh and they make each other laugh at themselves. Martha tries something and doesn't pull it off, George caps her, and she appreciates his effort. It's cool. It's part of their relationship. Honestly, I never understood why people didn't understand how funny this was.

At the end of the reading of the first act, Edward came over to me and he said he hadn't seen anything like it since Uta Hagen performed the role. And I said, "Well, thank you. We have two more acts to go. Hold on, baby."

In the break between the first and second act, everybody was just beaming. We were like Cheshire cats. We finished the reading around two in the afternoon. I went home thinking, It'll probably be weeks before we have a decision on whether or not this will be a go. And I was soon to turn my witching age of fifty!

They called at five-thirty that same afternoon and said, "So, do you want it?" I said, "What do you mean, do I want it? What, are you crazy? What the hell have I been saying for the last two years?"

I got the role of Martha just before I turned fifty.

And then I was really scared. I thought, Oh my God - is there a real plan here? It's not all random? All these steps I took really made it happen? No, I do not think it is random. My friends would say I "Kathleen Turnered" it. I can't seem to keep from taking action when I want to get something done, even if I am afraid.

I literally got the shakes once I knew I had Martha. I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to pull off all my boasts. It was a huge undertaking, a huge test.

My last show on Broadway had been The Graduate, which was commercially a huge success but the critics were very tough on the play. Tough on me personally too. Ben Brantley, the New York Times theatre critic, called the play "weary" and my performance as Mrs. Robinson "little more than a stunt," more appropriate for Xena: Warrior Princess than the Broadway stage.

And of course there had been many other jokes about my twenty seconds of nudity onstage. Maureen Lipman, the brilliant British writer, actress, and comedienne, was doing a one-woman show when I was doing The Graduate in London. She sent a letter to one of the newspapers saying that she would be performing her show in glasses and socks so that one may see what a real forty-something-year-old woman looks like. And then she wrote me this note: "My ticket sales went down." The whole thing was a joke. My great friend Maggie Smith was doing Alan Bennett's play Lady in the Van at the time, and she said to Alan, "Kathleen's doing such wonderful business over there, I'm thinking that perhaps in the end scene when the lady rises, we should do that in the nude." She said there was this long pause. And she said, "Alan, I'm joking. I'd look like a Ubangi." It was very funny. Women, you know, don't take this as seriously as men. At least, actresses don't.

But I knew I had some tall mountains to climb to be given a fair evaluation as Martha.

But if I hadn't done The Gradaute, I could never have done Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

One of the problems of having started my career as a younger beautiful woman known for sexuality - a woman whose characters have been sexy, I should say - is that there's an inherent dismissal of her as an individual. It probably extends to beautiful young men, but certainly to young, beautiful women. There's a sense of these women being quite interchangeable, not unique of individually necessary.

These days I face a different hurdle. People assume a woman my age is not supposed to be attractive or sexually appealing. I get very tired of that and relish opportunities to counteract that. Playing the role of Mrs. Robinson, who in her midforties seduces a young man less than half her age, was one of those stereotype-busting choices. But it had a deeper personal meaning to me too.

I started performing in The Graduate at forty-five. Performed it at forty-six in London. We brought it to New York when I was forty-eight. I don't think people in the audience doubted that Mrs. Robinson was capable of seducing Benjamin or that she had the allure, the power, and the sexuality to entrap this much younger man. That's greatly a matter of having the confidence and projecting that confidence to others.

Appearing nude on film was not easy when I was twenty-six in Body Heat; it was even harder when I was forty-six in The Graduate, on the stage, which is more up close and personal than film. After my middle-aged nude scene, though, I unexpectedly got letters from women saying, "I have not undressed in front of my husband in ten years and I'm going to tonight." Or, "I have not looked in the mirror at my body and you gave me permission."

These affirmations from other women were especially touching to me because when I began The Graduate I'd just come through a period when I felt a great loss of confidence, when my rheumatoid arthritis hit me hard and I literally couldn't walk or do any of the things I was so used to doing. It used to be that if I said to my body, "Leap across the room now," it would leap instantly. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. I hadn't realized how much my confidence was based on my physicality. On my ability to make my body do whatever I wanted it to do.

I was so consumed, not just by thinking about what I could and couldn't do, but also by handling the pain, the continual, chronic pain. I didn't realize how pain colored my whole world and how depressive it was. Before I was finally able to control my RA with proper medication, I truly had thought that my attractiveness and my ability to be attractive to men was gone, was lost. So for me to come back and do The Graduate was an affirmation to myself. I had my body back. I was back.

But I still had some other important body work to do to be ready to play Martha. Rheumatoid arthritis eats up your joints. I knew I had to have my right knee replaced in order to physically do the play. And once that was really clear to me - because you don't want to rush into things like replacing joints in your body - I immediately had the surgery. I had only about eight weeks to rehab and get back into shape to do the play.

And I did it. I did it. The surgery probably saved my left knee too because neither of them was very good. Martha could wear cushy padded slippers to cope with the pain in my feet, but she had to be very physical in the fight scenes and her body language throughout the play. It wouldn't have been fair if I'd been unable to go on because of the pain. So I had to have the surgery. But that added a great deal of stress to the already intense stress of taking on Martha.

And so when Virginia opened in New York to great reviews, and when Edward Albee wrote me a very kind note, which I had framed, telling me I made him happy to be a playwright, and when the critic Ben Brnatley apologized in print for underestimating me, for assuming that because I'd made the choice of playing Mrs. Robinson before, I wouldn't be capable of playing Martha now, I wept.

Oh, yes, this felt far better than winning a Tony ever could. Brantley saw exactly the points I wanted people to see, saw that I had been able to communicate with the audience exactly what I had intended. Even better, he really saw Martha.

At 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie "Body Heat". But in the third and last act she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish.

When she sits at the center of the stage quietly reciting a litany of the reasons she loves her dearly despised husband, you feel she has peeled back each layer of her skin to reveal what George describes as the marrow of a person. I was fortunate enough to have seen Uta Hagen, who created Martha, reprise the role in a staged reading in 1999, and I didn't think I would ever be able to see "Virginia Woolf" again without thinking of Ms. Hagen.

But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in "The Graduate", I didn't see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let's be fair. All I saw was Martha.

Aah, I thought to myself, well, now. People can say, "Maybe she was cute or sexy and she took her clothes off then," but they'd have to add, "Just look at what she can do now."

The Books: "Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles" (Kathleen Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles, by Kathleen Turner (with Gloria Feldt)

I forget sometimes that Body Heat was Kathleen Turner's debut. How is that possible? Her performance is so strong, so suggestive of the entire history of film noir and femme fatales - it has its own specificity yet it also references every bad dame ever to stroll across celluloid ... She is smokin' hot, and she knows how to use it, but it's more of a long low smoulder than anything more flashy. You ache watching her. The movie is through Bill Hurt's eyes, so that's appropriate. This is a man who smashes through a window just because she's standing there. He MUST have her. Turner walks that line in her performance like an old pro. Another actress would have overdone the sexual-ness, being little more than a cat in heat, and missed that it is the SMOULDER that needs to be there, the long slow boil that will drive a man mad. That's hard to do. Lauren Bacall does it in To Have and Have Not. It requires the ability to be still, to hold back, to have it all be in the eyes.

It was Turner's debut. The mind boggles. In her book, which came out last year, she writes a lot about that shoot, and what it was like for her. She was a stage actress, living in New York. Film-making was a total unknown thing to her. She had done some extra work on a soap opera, I think - that was her only experience in front of a camera. Amazing. So she learned on the job. Most people learn on the job with smaller roles first. Not her. She was learning on the job while playing a lead. That required full body nudity. She had a good head on her shoulders, and it's very interesting to read her version of events, her process. She was such a newbie. The fact that a whole morning would be spent filming a closeup of her fingers tapping on the counter blew her mind ... and she was such a theatre person, she would be thinking, "God, you would never see such a thing on stage ... THIS is what film can give you ..." But still. You never see what a newbie she is in that performance.

Her salary for Body Heat was $30,000. Afterwards, before it came out, she went back to New York and started waitressing again. Her agent and the studio wanted to hold Turner back - didn't want her to be in anything else that might dilute the impact of Body Heat. Now that is a hell of a risk to take. What if Body Heat had flopped? That means she would have stepped out of the business for almost a year - which you just can't do, especially not when you're a young hot woman. You have ZERO time to make your mark ... but Turner, always one for taking risks - you really get that in her book - said, "Okay, cool, I won't do anything until Body Heat comes out." Good thing she didn't because it was like she had come from out of nowhere - this sultry knowing ice-cool yet boiling-hot blonde ... where did SHE come from?? It intensified her impact. But still: remember it was a risk. $30,000 may sound like a lot for one job, but it's really not. Because let's say you made, oh, $5,000 the year before as an actress - in small parts or theatre roles - and then you supplemented your yearly income by waitressing or teaching or whatever. Much of that $30,000 would disappear instantly, already going to pay overdue bills from your years of living below the poverty-line (income-wise, I mean) ... and that's what happened with Turner. She was waitressing in New York, after filming Body Heat, and people would ask her what she was up to, and she'd say, "Yeah, I did this movie ... it hasn't come out yet though." She was about to become a huge star.

I happen to love her in Romancing the Stone. That's another role where she had to, in her performance, reference other performances - it's a genre, a well-known style - the adventure movie, sure, but in the style of old serials, mixed with the delicious 1940s Howard Hawks gender wars with back-and-forth repartee between worthy foes who fight and fuck, basically ... This is not your straight drama or straight comedy. It's a parody, a spoof - as well as a movie that works on its own merits. (Can you tell I love it?) But what I'm trying to get at is, yet again, Turner was playing a reference-point - a certain KIND of part - same as she did in Body Heat, only now she totally switched it up and played the uptight-yet-romantic woman who is totally undone and frazzled and turned on by her encounter with this wild man. You know, the librarian who takes off her glasses. Nothing - NOTHING - would prepare you for Kathleen Turner's versatility from Body Heat. It's really rather amazing. I believe that if she had stayed playing hot temptresses her career would have been about 6 years long. But immediately following Body Heat, she started switching it all up - The Man with Two Brains, Romancing the Stone. Now what, to me, all of this really reveals - is Turner's love for camp. She "gets" it. It's not just a surface imitation - it's an embodiment of a certain style, and the campier the better. Body Heat, seen in this light, could be taken as one of the best camp performances of all time. I actually think that's what Sharon Stone was up to in Basic Instict - ridiculous film, but a deliciously campy performance - which I wrote about here - scroll down to the picture of Stone. I wrote:

I thought Stone gave one of the campiest (in the best way) most specific and fantastic performances of that entire decade. I look at it not as reality - or like she was trying to play a real person - I saw it as high camp - a nod to Jane Greer and Barbara Stanwyck and all the devious film-noir femme fatales. No wonder she became a star. I know she's nuts - but that was a star performance and she was NOT a star when she gave it. That takes balls. Well-deserved success, in my opinion.

It was great to see Turner and Michael Douglas again in War of the Roses - another campy romp. So much fun. They were great together.

There's a BIG-ness to Kathleen Turner. Subtlety is not her strong suit. In a way, she is difficult to cast because of that, but she has been very lucky. Her sex appeal was enormous, and that wasn't an accident (she writes a lot about that in her book) - she worked at it. She describes it as "turning on a tap". She has her insecurities like anyone, and getting naked in front of an entire crew was nerve-wracking (although crews are notoriously the most professional types around - they've seen it all ... they know how to be respectful and create a safe space for the actors to do what they have to do.) But Turner said that she would have her moments, during filming of Body Heat when the cameras were on, and the crew were basically hanging off the balcony holding lights and booms - when she felt like she was in the Coliseum, gladiators battling it out - only it was her sexuality that she had to show. In between takes, she would go back to her trailer and weep. She didn't feel degraded, she makes that very clear - but showing that kind of energy is scary, and usually it's done privately - your husband or your boyfriend gets to see it - and even then it might be nervewracking to let the cat out of the bag. But to do so take after take, in front of a large crowd, was a "raw" experience (her word), and yet she realized very early on that that would be her stock in trade. That was what she had to offer, and it set her apart from other actresses. She wasn't just sexy. She was hot, and when she turned on that tap, people went nuts. She managed to negotiate that aspect of herself very gracefully, I think - and here she is, in her 50s, still trying to negotiate it. Because you see Turner now, and she's heavy (although still gorgeous) - and the memory of that slim burning flame of a woman is still in all of our brains ... a painful thing for many actresses. People can be unforgiving. They don't want to see their sex bombs get older. Turner has certainly experienced that in her life. Not to mention her health problems, her drinking, and her battle with rheumatoid arthritis.

But we don't stop being sexual beings just because we're older (hopefully) - and Turner has been courageous enough to continue to explore that aspect of herself - now on Broadway rather than in films - in The Graduate as Mrs. Robinson (which I saw - not a very good show, but she was a lot of fun and the only one up on that stage who knew how to act in the THEATRE) - and then, spectacularly, as Martha in the highly acclaimed revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I saw that production and it was a high watermark for me, in terms of live performance. She was unbelievable. Her performance stayed with me for days. Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens was another high watermark for me. I'm trying to think of more - there aren't many. When I was in Ireland as a 12 year old girl, we went to see Ibsen's Doll's House at the Abbey and whoever that Irish actress was playing Nora - she was so blazingly good that I still remember some of her stage business and blocking so many years later. The scene where she desperately dances the tarantella to stop her husband from going to the mailbox? I have goosebumps right now typing this. That woman was out of this world. Acting rarely gets that good. Let's see, who else. I saw Bill Pullman do Edward Albee's The Goat on Broadway - and while I always liked Pullman I hadn't really realized how damn good he was until I saw him onstage. He was fantastic. And that is a hard play. An upper-class man falls in love with a goat that he sees during a drive in the country. This isn't a joke. He looks in that goat's eyes and sees a sexy kindred spirit. He hides his affair from his wife (played beautifully by Mercedes Ruehl) for a while until he can no longer stand it and comes clean. The play was uproariously funny but why it was funny was that Pullman played it all straight. He REALLY was in love, and his heart was torn to shreds because of it. That play could so have fallen flat on its face, but he was so damn good. I haven't forgotten it. Swoosie Kurtz in House of Blue Leaves was a high watermark for me, too. But although I've seen much good theatre, much that I really love - those performances that burn their way into your psyche - are few and far between.

Kathleen Turner as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the most powerful pieces of live acting I have ever seen. I saw it the week it opened, I think - it was very early on in the run - but I have friends who saw it later in the run and said it was just as intense, just as raw. Ted saw it (am I getting this memory right, Ted??) and as the audience left the theatre, Ted was following behind two women. The crowd dispersed down the sidewalk, and Ted found himself still behind those same two women. Half a block away from the theatre, one of the women suddenly buckled over, and burst into hysterical sobs. A delayed reaction from the play. She and her friend stood out of the way of the flow of traffic, and as Ted passed by, the woman was still out of control, sobbing. By the end of that play, you have been put through the wringer. Not just Turner was great - everyone was great - and Turner was just magnificent in that ensemble setting.

Here's my review of the play.

The play is obviously funny. I laugh out loud when I read the script. Turner got a laugh on almost every line - she got laughs where I didn't see laughs. Her delivery was superb. It was JUICY, rich, bitchy, tragic - such a good performance. And then in the last scene of the play, where the secret comes out - she falls apart. Her work was so stunningly real that I couldn't believe that what she had done was actually part of the script, and when I got home, I pulled out the script to see if she had deviated, or if what she had done was actually on the page. And it was. This is the greatest compliment to an actress I can think of. When George comes out with the secret, Martha falls to her knees and her line is, "Oh no!" Now how does one play that? How does one go about playing such a moment? What exactly does one work on?

Meryl Streep tells a great story about the filming of the "choice" moment in Sophie's Choice. It goes a long way towards explaining her "process" (which is good, because she sure as hell can't explain it!). She said that she glanced at the script once, before filming, skipped her eyes over the scene, and never looked at it again until the day of filming. She didn't work on it, or agonize over it. She knew what would be required of her, and with just one glance-over she knew it would rip her heart out - so she didn't think about it at all until the moment came to film it. A moment like that, if your talent is fluid and accessible enough, plays itself. But it does require that you live it. You can't "phone in" a moment like that. A good actress knows when she has to work and when she doesn't. You work on the right things, you don't waste your energy. Streep didn't waste her energy worrying about that scene, knowing, in her heart, that when the time came to film it - her sense of reality and identification and horror would have no choice but to come flowing out.

And that's what I saw when I saw Kathleen Turner fall to her knees and call out, like a character from a Greek tragedy, "Oh, no!" It was a cry of the soul, all that character's grief and loss was in it - the grief of the ages. An amazing moment of live theatre and I still couldn't believe that that "Oh no" was ever stark words on the page because Turner so made it come to life. It was unbearable to watch. It's like when cameras and microphones are shoved into the faces of people who have just lost everything in a fire, flood, tornado. Their lives are ruined. They are bereft. "How do you feel?" shout the reporters. Watching them in their pain feels intrusive, like we should leave them alone - an animal slinking off to the woods to lick its wounds. Turner was a wounded animal in that moment, howling out her pain, and it was embarrassing. I LOVE being embarrassed like that in the theatre, it happens so rarely. Sometimes you're just embarrassed because the play sucks, but embarrassment like what I felt in that last scene of Virginia Woolf comes close to being a truly divine experience. It is the meaning of catharsis.

Turner's book is honest, ballsy, and probably made her some enemies. She tells secrets. But not just on others - she tells secrets on herself, too. But her portrait of William Hurt during Body Heat is complex, she's not afraid to describe their conflicts. He was Mr. Method Man at the time and was really put off by the fact that Turner would be joking around with the crew moments before filming. He didn't get that that was her process - that she didn't want to expend her energy before the camera was rolling. He was annoyed. Turner describes the conflicts straight - you don't get the sense that she holds a grudge, she and Hurt are still good friends - but she has nothing to lose from being really honest. The book is honest as well about her drinking, and how much she came to need it.

And one of the other things that was amazing to me about her performance in Virginia Woolf was how physical it was - dancing, sashaying, falling over the couch, sitting on the floor - and Turner lives in almost constant physical pain from her arthritis. She did what she needed to do to be able to get through the run of that show without hurting herself - but when I think of her physical limitations and remember her falling to her knees, arms outstretched in horror, screaming, "Oh no" tears come to my eyes.

Good for her, man. Good for her.

I have chosen an excerpt from her book about how she campaigned to play Martha. I did not know the backstory to that production - that it was Turner who really made the whole thing happen, basically just by saying over and over to the powers-that-be, "I must play this part. I must play this part." There is a time to be humble, and then there is a time to be bold. "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." When you are pushing Edward Albee to allow you to bring out a production of a show he has not allowed performed in New York in 30 years, that is NOT the time to be humble. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.

I remember reading Ben Brantley's review in The NY Times (I wrote about it here) - the one she excerpts so proudly below (and rightly so) - and it was right after reading his review that I ordered tickets. Immediately. "I have to see this."

A funny thing: Turner had read the play in college and was blown away by it. It awakened something in her. She was 20 years old. She knew, "I HAVE to play this part someday." She had it in her head as a goal that she would play it before she turned 50. And I am very interested in how she made it her own. It's not an easy thing to do. It's like making Stanley Kowalski your own. And in many ways, an actor - when faced with that - has to say, "NO. MY version will be THIS ..." It requires a rejection of what has gone before. Not easy to do, especially with these roles that have been indelibly portrayed by others ... it's like you need to give yourself permission to do it your way.

She determined, at the ripe age of 20, that she would play that part when she was 50.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Kathleen Turner, opened on Broadway in March 2005, almost a year after her 50th birthday. She made her deadline!

EXCERPT FROM Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles, by Kathleen Turner (with Gloria Feldt)

I went about getting the role of Martha step by step, because I found her character so compelling from the very first time I read the play. I suppose I chose age fifty as my goal with the idea that she would be past childbearing age. Because the truth is, the play is not really a tragedy unless you know that Martha will never be able to have a child. If she's young enough that it would be possible for her still to hope for a child, then her character is not as deeply tragic as it could, should be. So I had fifty set in my mind. In this day and age, we think in terms of in vitro and other variations on the usual way of becoming pregnant. And we value women for attributes other than motherhood. But I think about Martha in 1960, when the play was set. Life was so different for women then, so much more restricted.

She is intelligent, ambitious, energetic. As she confesses, she worships her father, who was the president of the university. She so desires to please him. Her father has crippled her by not seeing who she is or what she has to offer. She had briefly married "the lawn mower", as they referred to the gardener at the boarding school she attended; that made her a damaged person to her father. If it were today, she could have aspired to be a university president herself, or to some other career of her choosing. That would have given her life a whole new purpose, a whole new meaning. But it's 1960, so her ambitions had to be channeled, funneled, achieved by a man - her father before she was married and thereafter, her husband.

As much as she and George love each other and always have, it's been a terrible disappointment to her that he has shared none of her ambitions and certainly will not be the heir to her father's presidency. After twenty-five years, George is still an associate professor. You have to work hard to fail that much.

And without children, what does she have? She gets to be on committees of faculty wives, to have a spring Easter egg hunt or a Christmas party or crap like that, which means nothing to her. She doesn't have any standing other than as her father's daughter or as her husband's wife. She's not a mother, can't be a baby maker, so she doesn't have that title of respect. Today, we women tend to have more options, not fewer, as we get older. Martha had almost none as she approached her fifties. This time of life that to me is so freeing, to Martha must have been terribly stifling.

So she sits in the empty house day after day and she starts drinking. Which I think many would do, frankly, in that situation. I think I would if i were sitting around with all that ability but no way to see that I could do something fruitful with it, or do something that used my abilities or challenged my mind. It would be dreadful. Anyone would feel defeated or might overeat or drink or do drugs.

Perhaps some exceptional women would have found another private outlet such as writing that they could control on their own. But I think that would be the exception and that they would have been seen as abnormal by the rest of society. Martha chafes at the irrational boundaries, but not in a political way. Her behavior has no boundaries. She has no limits physically or vocally. She just throws herself around without any thought as to the proper behavior.

Poor woman, I started out feeling very angry with her and quite disgusted, and I thought, Oh, stop it! Pull yourself together - this is rubbish. But then more and more I began to empathize with her. This happens to me often with characters. I play so many awful ones. They turn out to be more interesting than the good girls. You always know what a good girl is going to do. You never know what a bad girl is going to do. It's much more fun.

I didn't see the whole film and I've never seen a stage production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Knowing always that I wanted to do Martha, I would never willingly want to have someone else's performance in my head. But in my readings of it, I always thought it was extremely funny. I saw big laughs. I never understood why no one spoke of it that way. I like a hard-edged humor, and that's definitely Virginia Woolf to me. The little I saw of the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor film I disliked immensely, but I think that's because it was performed with acceptance of the culture of the time rather than a questioning of it. It seemed to me that their George and Martha were just two drunks screaming at each other and tearing each other apart for a night. I didn't understand this at all. Because my perception reading the play had been so very different.

With most characters, I find I go through stages where I truly dislike them, and then I start to find the reasons for their behavior - then I start to have sympathy for them and then empathy, and then I feel they're totally justified. Somebody says, "How could she do that?"

Because she had to, okay?

And I had to play Martha.

Fear tries to overtake me when I am between jobs. I had just finished the Broadway run of The Graduate and was looking anxiously to what I would do next. I am inclined to try to overcome fear by jumping right into its face, to do that which I am afraid of doing. I decided to ask directly for what I wanted most - to play Martha.

By the time I was forty-eight, I was on a comfortable standing with most of the major Broadway producers. I'd done enough work that was very good so I could speak with any of them if I wanted to. I set out to get the role I'd been coveting since I was twenty.

Liz McCann has been Edward Albee's producer for years. He doesn't allow anyone else to produce his plays. So I had to get to Liz. Fortunately, she's a great friend of the Nederlanders', who own theaters in which Albee's plays have been produced, and Jimmy Nederlander Jr. is a great friend of mine. I asked Jimmy and his fiancee, Margo MacNabb, also a dear friend, to set up a dinner with Liz and Jay and me. Just social, you know.

During the course of the evening, I told Liz that I wanted Virginia Woolf. "I want Martha," I said. And Liz said, "Well, I don't think that's going to happen." Edward had not allowed the play to be performed in New York since 1975. Liz told me he didn't express any desire to do it; he'd had some readings over the last few years with other actresses but had not approved any of them. And career-wise, he was still writing new plays. The Goat had come out that year. He didn't want to be known just for his old material. All of which was completely understandable.

I pressed on. "Yes, but you have no idea how well I would do this. I really need - no, you really need me to do this." "No, no, no, no" was her response.

I kept after Liz for weeks after that. I want to talk to Edward. I want to meet with Edward. I want to see him. Finally she set up a lunch and the three of us got together. This was before the presidential election in 2004. Edward and I are on the same side politically, and we share a great number of concerns. It was a very interesting, challenging conversation over lunch. The man is absolutely brilliant. We never even got to the play; we just talked politics and everything that goes with that. But I'm told that I became Martha during the course of the lunch.

Finally, as we were leaving the restaurant, Edward said, "All right, what do you want?" I said, "I want to read Martha."

When I met with Edward after that, I said, "Look, I'm funny and we'll get a funny George. I think the dark humor in the play has never been realized." He said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "No, I don't think anybody's seen it created as the comedy it could and should be." He was skeptical but said, "Oh, fine, right."

So what did I want, he asked again. Again I said I wanted a reading. We agreed to put together the reading.

Then we started desperately thinking of who we would get as George. Bill Irwin's name came up and I thought, Oh, that's brilliant. He is a great comedian and an inspired clown, and talk about your timing - that boy has got it. Yeah, he's got it. He has the clear, clear intelligence that needs to be demonstrated by George. And he'd just played in Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in London for a time. I thought, Oh, this is a stunning idea. There were many other leading actors who wanted this reading, but once Bill's name came up, that was it for me. I said, "Yes, we've got to get him in here."

Next I took the extra step to make sure my own reading would be the best it could possibly be. I got together with Anthony Page, the very talented British director who has done many of Albee's plays, and he worked with us before we did the reading. Anthony later said he thought I looked like Martha, strong and somewhat plain, and unpretentious, as though I'd really lived. Ha! Is that a compliment? At any rate, working with Anthony in advance of the reading was a real plus in my preparation.

When we did our read-through, Edward was there along with the director, the producers, and a number of other people. Edward started laughing soon after we began. And let me tell you something: he doesn't laugh easily.

Now, everyone can see that in this production, there are huge laughs throughout the first act, every three or four lines. In the second act, there are fewer, and the third act, fewer still. But even in the most difficult parts, Albee sets up big laughs that previous productions have not generally made the most of. Even at the very end, when Martha says, "Show me the telegram," and George says, "I ate it." My God, it's a shock laugh, yes. But the physical action of laughing releases a great deal of tension in everyone. It allows you as an actor to build the tension back up again and to keep the audience with you.

That humor is a part of the characters' deep, deep hurt. They make each other laugh and they make each other laugh at themselves. Martha tries something and doesn't pull it off, George caps her, and she appreciates his effort. It's cool. It's part of their relationship. Honestly, I never understood why people didn't understand how funny this was.

At the end of the reading of the first act, Edward came over to me and he said he hadn't seen anything like it since Uta Hagen performed the role. And I said, "Well, thank you. We have two more acts to go. Hold on, baby."

In the break between the first and second act, everybody was just beaming. We were like Cheshire cats. We finished the reading around two in the afternoon. I went home thinking, It'll probably be weeks before we have a decision on whether or not this will be a go. And I was soon to turn my witching age of fifty!

They called at five-thirty that same afternoon and said, "So, do you want it?" I said, "What do you mean, do I want it? What, are you crazy? What the hell have I been saying for the last two years?"

I got the role of Martha just before I turned fifty.

And then I was really scared. I thought, Oh my God - is there a real plan here? It's not all random? All these steps I took really made it happen? No, I do not think it is random. My friends would say I "Kathleen Turnered" it. I can't seem to keep from taking action when I want to get something done, even if I am afraid.

I literally got the shakes once I knew I had Martha. I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to pull off all my boasts. It was a huge undertaking, a huge test.

My last show on Broadway had been The Graduate, which was commercially a huge success but the critics were very tough on the play. Tough on me personally too. Ben Brantley, the New York Times theatre critic, called the play "weary" and my performance as Mrs. Robinson "little more than a stunt," more appropriate for Xena: Warrior Princess than the Broadway stage.

And of course there had been many other jokes about my twenty seconds of nudity onstage. Maureen Lipman, the brilliant British writer, actress, and comedienne, was doing a one-woman show when I was doing The Graduate in London. She sent a letter to one of the newspapers saying that she would be performing her show in glasses and socks so that one may see what a real forty-something-year-old woman looks like. And then she wrote me this note: "My ticket sales went down." The whole thing was a joke. My great friend Maggie Smith was doing Alan Bennett's play Lady in the Van at the time, and she said to Alan, "Kathleen's doing such wonderful business over there, I'm thinking that perhaps in the end scene when the lady rises, we should do that in the nude." She said there was this long pause. And she said, "Alan, I'm joking. I'd look like a Ubangi." It was very funny. Women, you know, don't take this as seriously as men. At least, actresses don't.

But I knew I had some tall mountains to climb to be given a fair evaluation as Martha.

But if I hadn't done The Gradaute, I could never have done Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

One of the problems of having started my career as a younger beautiful woman known for sexuality - a woman whose characters have been sexy, I should say - is that there's an inherent dismissal of her as an individual. It probably extends to beautiful young men, but certainly to young, beautiful women. There's a sense of these women being quite interchangeable, not unique of individually necessary.

These days I face a different hurdle. People assume a woman my age is not supposed to be attractive or sexually appealing. I get very tired of that and relish opportunities to counteract that. Playing the role of Mrs. Robinson, who in her midforties seduces a young man less than half her age, was one of those stereotype-busting choices. But it had a deeper personal meaning to me too.

I started performing in The Graduate at forty-five. Performed it at forty-six in London. We brought it to New York when I was forty-eight. I don't think people in the audience doubted that Mrs. Robinson was capable of seducing Benjamin or that she had the allure, the power, and the sexuality to entrap this much younger man. That's greatly a matter of having the confidence and projecting that confidence to others.

Appearing nude on film was not easy when I was twenty-six in Body Heat; it was even harder when I was forty-six in The Graduate, on the stage, which is more up close and personal than film. After my middle-aged nude scene, though, I unexpectedly got letters from women saying, "I have not undressed in front of my husband in ten years and I'm going to tonight." Or, "I have not looked in the mirror at my body and you gave me permission."

These affirmations from other women were especially touching to me because when I began The Graduate I'd just come through a period when I felt a great loss of confidence, when my rheumatoid arthritis hit me hard and I literally couldn't walk or do any of the things I was so used to doing. It used to be that if I said to my body, "Leap across the room now," it would leap instantly. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. I hadn't realized how much my confidence was based on my physicality. On my ability to make my body do whatever I wanted it to do.

I was so consumed, not just by thinking about what I could and couldn't do, but also by handling the pain, the continual, chronic pain. I didn't realize how pain colored my whole world and how depressive it was. Before I was finally able to control my RA with proper medication, I truly had thought that my attractiveness and my ability to be attractive to men was gone, was lost. So for me to come back and do The Graduate was an affirmation to myself. I had my body back. I was back.

But I still had some other important body work to do to be ready to play Martha. Rheumatoid arthritis eats up your joints. I knew I had to have my right knee replaced in order to physically do the play. And once that was really clear to me - because you don't want to rush into things like replacing joints in your body - I immediately had the surgery. I had only about eight weeks to rehab and get back into shape to do the play.

And I did it. I did it. The surgery probably saved my left knee too because neither of them was very good. Martha could wear cushy padded slippers to cope with the pain in my feet, but she had to be very physical in the fight scenes and her body language throughout the play. It wouldn't have been fair if I'd been unable to go on because of the pain. So I had to have the surgery. But that added a great deal of stress to the already intense stress of taking on Martha.

And so when Virginia opened in New York to great reviews, and when Edward Albee wrote me a very kind note, which I had framed, telling me I made him happy to be a playwright, and when the critic Ben Brnatley apologized in print for underestimating me, for assuming that because I'd made the choice of playing Mrs. Robinson before, I wouldn't be capable of playing Martha now, I wept.

Oh, yes, this felt far better than winning a Tony ever could. Brantley saw exactly the points I wanted people to see, saw that I had been able to communicate with the audience exactly what I had intended. Even better, he really saw Martha.

At 50, this actress can look ravishing and ravaged, by turns. In the second act, she is as predatorily sexy as she was in the movie "Body Heat". But in the third and last act she looks old, bereft, stripped of all erotic flourish.

When she sits at the center of the stage quietly reciting a litany of the reasons she loves her dearly despised husband, you feel she has peeled back each layer of her skin to reveal what George describes as the marrow of a person. I was fortunate enough to have seen Uta Hagen, who created Martha, reprise the role in a staged reading in 1999, and I didn't think I would ever be able to see "Virginia Woolf" again without thinking of Ms. Hagen.

But watching Ms. Turner in that last act, fully clothed but more naked than she ever was in "The Graduate", I didn't see the specter of Ms. Hagen. All I saw was Ms. Turner. No, let's be fair. All I saw was Martha.

Aah, I thought to myself, well, now. People can say, "Maybe she was cute or sexy and she took her clothes off then," but they'd have to add, "Just look at what she can do now."

The Books: "The Story Of My Life" (Ellen Terry)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

This is one of my favorite books in my entire collection, just in terms of it as an object. Second only to the first-edition Ulysses that my dad recently gave to me. The book I have is a second or third edition according to the copyright page (I can't quite tell which) - but either way, the book I own actually came out around the time that it was published. Boy, they knew how to make books back then! The pages are thick and shiny, and you can see the indent of the print on the page. There is a frontispiece of Ellen Terry, and a beautiful title page, with ceremonious curly-cue print. It's a big book, her life was long and full of many events - and scattered throughout are glossy old photographs, etchings, and paintings - of Ellen Terry in all of her great roles. I almost feel strange reading such a book because the book itself is a work of art.

But in terms of the book itself: What a book!!! What a life!!

She writes in simple prosey language, but with an emotionality that shines through. Her character sketches of the people she knew (Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt - the woman knew EVERYONE) are riveting. It's a book that takes its time, too. She doesn't hop and skip over events, she delves in ... to rehearsal processes, and long conversations she had about art, and acting, and Shakespeare. She is interested, primarily, in the work, and the whole book is a long paean to the life of an artist. Anyone interested in acting should definitely read this book - but anyone interested in the entire history of that era should also check it out. The upheavals in art and criticism in England at that time, the pre-Raphaelites, the decadents, the aesthetes ... she was part of that group.

Lewis Carroll (or "Dodson" as she calls him affectionately) adored her and her sisters (not surprisingly) and took this photo of Ellen and her sister Kate.

Ellen Terry was born into a theatrical family. She was third generation "show trash". Her parents were famous comic actors, and they had eleven children - most of whom went into show business as well. Gordon Craig, famous scenic designer, was Terry's illegitimate child. She did not believe in "pushing" her children - whatever they wanted they had to fight for on their own ... but obviously her successes and example rubbed off, as many of them went into the theatre as well. As a matter of fact, the legacy continues. John Gielgud was Ellen Terry's great-nephew. Extraordinary. I love Terry's anecdotes about her children coming to see her perform. Funny stuff:

My little daughter was a severe critic! I think if I had listened to her, I should have left the stage in despair. She saw me act for the first time as Mabel Vane, but no compliments were to be extracted from her.

"You did look long and thin in your gray dress."

"When you fainted I thought you was going to fall into the orchestra - you was so long."

Ellen Terry describes her own childhood and there are some really funny moments when my 21st century sensibility is gobsmacked by the childrearing practices of the day. Her parents, naturally, had to work at night at the theatre, so they would lock their children in their hotel room and go off to do the show. Some of the children were infants, others only 5 or 6, and in charge of taking care of the little ones. Nothing bad ever happened. Terry describes kneeling on a window seat, looking out into the night, waiting for her parents to return. She has a vivid memory, as most actors do, and she is able to bring that to life in her writing. It's truly wonderful stuff.

Terry, naturally, went on to the stage, because there was really nothing else to do in such a family. She made her debut as a young child in 1856, playing with the great Charles Kean in The Winter's Tale. She traveled with her parents, performing with them at times - but it became clear very early on that light comedy would not be Ellen Terry's forte. She eventually became known as the premiere actress of Shakespeare in England, and that reputation exists to this day. She performed in stock theatre, regional gigs - she was playing major roles in Shakespeare by the time she was 15. As a young woman, she had huge hits - she played Portia in Merchant of Venice in 1875 and it was such a huge hit that it was what she became known for. She re-created the role of Portia many times in her career. Not only was she a star in the theatre world, but she served as muse for the literary types who hovered around her. London was a much smaller place back then (although I suppose the art world is small wherever you go) - and the circles of art intersected. Writers went to the theatre and came home and wrote sonnets to the performances they had just seen. Oscar Wilde, in 1890, wrote a sonnet after seeing Terry play Portia:

PORTIA
to Ellen Terry
I marvel not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead,
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head,
Or that Morocco's fiery heart grew cold:
For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold
Which is more golden than the golden sun,
No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.
Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield
The sober-suited lawyer's gown you donned
And would not let the laws of Venice yield
Antonio's heart to that accursed Jew-
O Portia! take my heart; it is thy due:
I think I will not quarrel with bond.

He also wrote the following poem to her at the Lyceum Theatre:

As one who poring on a Grecian urn
Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,
God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,
And for their beauty's sake is loath to turn
And face the obvious day, must I not yearn
For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,
When is the midmost shrine of Artemis
I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?

And yet- methinks I'd rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken,- come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am growing sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!

I'm reading Richard Ellmann's majestic biography of Oscar Wilde right now, and he was great friends with the actors of the day - he was trying to become a playwright, first of all, and needed more than anything for one of the star actresses to decide to do his new works (not an easy task) - and he was also always looking for evidence of artifice - not a bad word, in his lexicon - where the surface, the form, completely captured the inner life of beauty. Actors and actresses were perfect examples of this.

Ellen Terry married three times, and her first marriage was to the painter G.F. Watts. This is another example of the circles of art intersecting. Watts had seen all of the Terrys in their various productions - and did many paintings of all of them, the most famous being the ones of Ellen. You'll recognize them.

That last one depicts her as Ophelia in Hamlet (although she had not yet played that role at the time Watts imagined her into it.)

Her performances drew raves, and she eventually crossed the ocean to tackle the American audience and had great triumphs there as well. In 1878, Terry became part of the great Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre company. She was basically co-producer with him, as well as his leading lady. They were partners for over 20 years, and played every Shakespeare play, multiple times - in London, and also in traveling shows. They were the dynamic duo of the time, an unbeatable team. She made her name (even more so) with some of the roles she performed with Irving. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (one of the best parts for women in the entire Shakespeare canon) was one of her biggest successes. Here she is as Beatrice:

Henry Irving was her dear partner, and friend - and a great inspiration to her. When he died, she found she could not work for a while, because all joy had gone out of the pursuit with him no longer around. She loved him dearly. Listen to this excerpt from her book about him. It makes me want to cry.

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg ... he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train - always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute - and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me - with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well."

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"

Here she is with Irving:

Her correspondence is rightly famous, and she carried on a lengthy one with George Bernard Shaw. After the partnership with Irving ended, Terry became artistic director of the old Imperial Theatre, and wanted to devote their seasons to the new playwrights, such as Ibsen and Shaw. Controversial stuff. The business was not a success - maybe Terry's first failure (besides her marriages) - but the resulting correspondence with Shaw is enough to make me look at it as a ringing success. I love one of the things he wrote to her about playing Shakespeare:

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.

Brilliant. It reminds me of the great anecdote Anthony Hopkins tells about acting in Shakespeare with Laurence Olivier very early on in his career. Hopkins, a melancholic Welshman (is there any other kind) gravitated towards the American style of acting, the "Method" acting of Brando and Clift - and tried to bring all of that to his role in Shakespeare. He was trying to show the subtext, and make it real for himself, etc. etc. not realizing that Shakespeare has already done all of that work and unlike other playwrights - it is all in the language. Olivier coached Hopkins and told him, "The thought is in the line. The only time you pause is at the end of the line where there is punctuation - because that means the thought is over." Don't add more thinking to it. Because the thought is in the line. That is one of the greatest challenges for any actor playing Shakespeare and you can see actors (mainly American) mucking that up time and time again. But I love Shaw's dictum: :"There simply isn't time for it."

Here is Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth:

Stunningly beautiful, isn't it?

Shaw said about Terry: "Every famous man of the 19th century- provided he were a playgoer- has been in love with Ellen Terry."

She was a great and beloved star. It's interesting - there was a time when Terry had considered giving up the stage, and I think she did stop working for about 1 or 2 years. Her parents were devastated. Hysterical. Other parents are devastated when their children go INTO show business, hers were devastated when she stopped.

From all I have read about her (and she shows up in any biography of that time - her life intersected with so many others) - she comes across as a lovely warm funny and quite formidable person. She was highly unconventional, modern in her attitudes - and yet also part of this ancient trashy enterprise that was the theatre. She was not a glorified prostitute as many of the leading ladies at that time were, with minimal talent, but great beauty to inspire men to lust and dirty thoughts in the midst of the Victorian properness. Ellen Terry was the real deal - an actress and entrepreneur who also had a canny business sense and, along with Henry Irving, helped bring well-produced and insightful productions all across England, ireland and America. She took risks. She had a low tolerance for being bored. And instead of whining about being bored, she would change her life at the first sign of it. When it was time to move on from something (be it an acting role or a marriage), she moved on. She had a "wild nature" (said one of her friends), and she was able to use that wild-ness beautifully in her 50-plus-year career. She did not self-destruct. She did not descend into infamy as so many other actresses of the day did (because theatre was seen as a barely respectable thing to do ... but Terry, being brought up in it, was saved from that attitude. To her, being an actress was the only logical thing she COULD do.)

Her reputation as a great actress remains intact, although no one alive today has seen her perform. She lived long enough to do a couple of silent films, but in general, her retirement was quiet. She lived to the age of 81. She bought a farm in Kent. She loved dogs. She slowly went blind, and eventually succumbed to dementia.

But the love of the populace remained - she was not forgotten. Her fame was still near enough at that point that she was remembered. Her social life was always intense, she was not a recluse or a serious dramatic woman. She was "vivacious" (the word most often used to describe her) and had what can only be described as eternal curiosity about her fellow man and the planet on which she lived. She wasn't "over" anything. She was not a cynic. She did not succumb to sophistication or bored European jaded-ness. There was always something in her that was like a little child, that little child kneeling on the window seat, looking out into the night, and wondering at the beauty of it all.

She must have been something else onstage. How I would love to have seen her.

The book is so PACKED with great anecdotes that I really struggled with which excerpt to pick. I thought I'd go with one where she talks about Irving playing Hamlet. It really gives a feel for the book.

She, of course, had heard of Henry Irving - and even seen him perform - but Hamlet was by far the most ambitious thing he had attempted. Just listen to how she analyzes it, and how she takes us through how great his Hamlet was, step by step. I especially love her observation about how Irving played Hamlet's famous speech to the players. Brilliant!!

She's a wonderful writer.

I had so much fun tracking down all the images for this post.

EXCERPT FROM The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever played, or was ever to play. If he had failed - but why pursue it? He could not fail.

Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that electric, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting - perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition of actors' artifices which used to bring down the house in "Louis XI" and "Richelieu," but which were really the easy things in acting, and in "Richelieu" (in my opinion) not especially well done. In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim.

I have seen many Hamlets - Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere! I refuse to go and see Hamlets now. I want to keep Henry Irving's fresh and clear in my memory until I die.

When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always consider the perfection of acting. It had been wonderful in 1874. In 1878 it was far more wonderful. It has been said that when he had the "advantage" of my Ophelia, his Hamlet "improved." I don't think so. He was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted.

The Birmingham night he knew I was there. He played - I say it without vanity - for me. We players are not above that weakness, if it be a weakness. If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the present in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we feel. The response from such a member of the audience flies across the footlights to us like a flame. I felt it once when I played Olivia before Eleonora Duse. I felt that she felt it once when she played Marguerite Gauthier for me.

When I read "Hamlet" now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time. I would give much to be able to record it all in detail - but it may be my fault - writing is not the medium in which this can be done. Sometimes I can remember every tone of Henry's voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning. Yes, I think I could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play.

"Words! words! words!" What is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or said, blood and breeding pervaded him.

His "make-up" was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look. Some said he looked twice his age.

He kept three things going at the same time - the antic madness, the sanity, the sense of the theatre. The last was to all that he imagined and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul to be to all other virtues.

He was never cross or moody - only melancholy. His melancholy was as simple as it was profound. It was touching, too, rather than defiant. You never thought that he was wantonly sad and enjoying his own misery.

He neglected no coup de theatre to assist him, but who notices the servants when the host is present?

For instance, his first entrance as Hamlet was, what we call in the theatre, very much "worked up". He was always a tremendous believer in processions, and rightly. It is through such means that Royalty keeps its hold on the feeling of the public, and makes its mark as a Figure and a Symbol. Henry Irving understood this. Therefore, to music so apt that it was not remarkable in itself, but merely a contribution to the general excited anticipation, the Prince of Denmark came on to the stage. I understood later on at the Lyceum what days of patient work had gone to the making of that procession.

At its tail, when the excitement was at fever heat, came the solitary figure of Hamlet, looking extraordinarily tall and thin. The lights were turned down - another stage trick - to help the effect that the figure was spirit rather than man.

He was weary - his cloak trailed on the ground. He did not wear the miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was one which I have seen in a common little illumination to the "Reciter", compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving's old schoolmaster). Yet how right to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its humble origin! Nothing could have been better when translated into life by Irving's genius.

The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow, the eyes burning - two fires veiled as yet by melancholy. But the appearance of the man was not single, straight or obvious, as it is when I describe it - any more than his passions throughout the play were. I only remember one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a straight-forward, unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back-water. It was when he said:

"The play's the thing
With which to catch the conscience of the King."

and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his tablets against one of the pillars.

"Oh, God, that I were a writer!" I paraphrase Beatrice with all my heart. Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry Irving's Hamlet and say nothing, nothing.

"We must start this play a living thing," he used to say at rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and power.

Bernardo: Who's there?
Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
Bernardo: Long live the King!
Francisco: Bernardo?
Bernardo: He.
Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.
Bernardo: 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
Francisco: For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold ...

And all that he tried to make others do with these lines, he himself did with every line of his own part. Every word lived.

Some said: "Oh, Irving only makes Hamlet a love poem!" They said that, I suppose, because in the Nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the lover above the prince and the poet. With what passionate longing his hands hovered over Ophelia at her words:

"Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind."

His advice to the players was not advice. He did not speak it as an actor. Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood. Irving defined the way he would have the players speak as an order, an instruction of the merit of which he was regally sure. There was no patronizing flavor in his acting here, not a touch of "I'll teach you how to do it." He was swift - swift and simple - pausing for the right word now and again, as in the phrase "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." His slight pause and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word "Nature" came in answer to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva). She was telling us the story of a play that she had written. The words rushed out swiftly, but occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in triumph over her head. "Like yours in 'Hamlet'," I told Henry at the time.

I knew this Hamlet both ways - as an actress from the stage, and as an actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the audience - and both ways it was superb to me. Tennyson, I know, said it was not a perfect Hamlet. I wonder, then, where he hoped to find perfection!

James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was "simply hideous ... a monster!" Another of these fine critics declared that he never could believe in Irving's Hamlet after having seen "part (sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama." Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by some of Irving's biographers?

Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the QuarterlyReviewer who declared that "the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured Mr. Irving's success"? The scenery was of the simplest - no money was spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel Bateman's death. Henry's dress probably cost him about £2!

My Ophelia dress was made of material which could not have cost more than 2s. a yard, and not many yards were wanted, as I was at the time thin to vanishing point! I have the dress still, and, looking at it the other day, I wondered what leading lady now would consent to wear it.

At all its best points, Henry's Hamlet was susceptible of absurd imitation. Think of this well, young actors, who are content to play for safety, to avoid ridicule at all costs, to be "natural" - oh, word most vilely abused! What sort of naturalness is this of Hamlet's?

"O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!"

Henry Irving's imitators could make people burst with laughter when they took off his delivery of that line. And, indeed, the original, too, was almost provocative of laughter - rightly so, for such emotional indignation has its funny as well as its terrible aspect. The mad, and all are mad who have, as Socrates put it, "a divine release from the common ways of men," may speak ludicrously, even when they speak the truth.

All great acting has a certain strain of extravagance which the imitators catch hold of and give us the eccentric body without the sublime soul.

From the first I saw this extravagance, this bizarrerie in Henry Irving's acting. I noticed, too, its infinite variety. In "Hamlet", during the first scene with Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, he began by being very absent and distant. He exchanged greetings sweetly and gently, but he was the visionary. His feet might be on the ground, but his head was towards the stars "where the eternal are." Years later he said to me of another actor in "Hamlet": "He would never have seen the ghost." Well, there was never any doubt that Henry Irving saw it, and it was through his acting in the Horatio scene that he made us sure.

As a bad actor befogs Shakespeare's meaning, so a good actor illuminates it. Bit by bit as Horatio talks, Hamlet comes back into the world. He is still out of it when he says:

"My father! Methinks I see my father."

But the dreamer becomes attentive, sharp as a needle, with the words:

"For God's love, let me hear."

Irving's face, as he listened to Horatio's tale, blazed with intelligence. He cross-examined the men with keenness and authority. His mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest of the world did not exist for him ... So onward to the crowning couplet:

" ... foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes."

After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if there never could be an end to his horror and his rage.

I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood - I had studied it; I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found that I had a fool of an idea of it! That's the advantage of study, good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done when you read the scene at home.

At one of the audiences I was much struck by Irving's treatment of interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet". He breathed the line: "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and "O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had practiced as far back as 1874.

"On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered. Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard. No less an authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to draw variations. Take the simplest illustration. The formal pronunciation of A-h is 'Ah', of O-h, 'Oh', but you cannot stereotype the expression of emotion like this. These exclamations are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation by dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them. Fancy an actor saying:

'My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!'

"Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and nature vindicated!"

It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer said that it was felt by every one present that "the truth had been spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through theory."

I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection. It was in courtesy and humor that it differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life - how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said; "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.

Hamlet was by far his greatest triumph, although he would not admit it himself - preferring in some moods to declare that his finest work was done in Macbeth, which was almost universally disliked.

The Books: "Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter" (Marguerite Courtney)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter, by Marguerite Courtney

Laurette Taylor had a long (and rather checkered) stage career - Broadway and regional - starting in 1909 - a career where her really big hit, the thing she was known for was Peg o' my Heart in 1912. It had been a personal triumph. Peg o' my Heart was such a success she became the toast of New York. She was still a kid. Success came very early - and then faded almost just as quickly. But she kept going, she kept trying, kept trying to find the next Peg o' my Heart.

They did a revival of that show, years later, and she was in it ... but she was only grasping at a long-ago glory. Nobody cared anymore.

There is a sadness in Laurette Taylor's face, a wistful longing for ... something ... not fame, not that exactly ... perhaps it was comfort, or respect, or finding a place in the theatre she could call home. She was a heartbreaking character, much beloved and revered ... with demons that took her over from time to time (she was a falling-down black-out drunk), and a certain amount of poetry and mischief that elevated her when she needed it. Or no, not when she needed it. There were decades in there where she could not access her own essence - the thing she needed to bring to the stage ... What she needed was a role. What she needed was THE role to help bring her back to life.

Enter young Tennessee Williams with this new play he had written called The Glass Menagerie.

At the time he entered her life, she was not in good shape. She was forgotten. A lush. A 60-year-old recluse drunk.

Her beloved second husband J. Hartley Manners (who had written Peg o' My Heart) died in 1928 - and she went on what was, for all intents and purposes, a 10-year bender. By the end of that decade, her entire fortune was gone, and everybody who had loved her, who had thought she was going to be the next biggest star, assumed that she must have died.

She was a wild-woman, and one of the most quotable of people. I love reading about her. She sounds like a hoot. I feel like I would have loved to know her.

My favorite Laurette Taylor anecdote (or one of them) is this:

Taylor was in the midst of doing a play, a play which was not a success. Nobody was showing up and it was universally panned. After one of the performances, Taylor went to a party, where I am sure she began to imbibe. She struck up a conversation with a young man, also at the party. They talked for a bit, and then he left, to go mingle. Taylor immediately turned to the hostess and said, "That man walked out on me tonight at the theatre!!"

The hostess, disbelieving, said, "Are you sure? How do you know?"

Taylor snapped, "I sometimes forget a face, but I never forget a back!"

Taylor also described the 10-year drinking binge after the death of her husband as "the longest wake in history."

She was a tough cookie, this one. And yet people talked (and still talk, oh my GOD, do they still talk) about her gift on the stage.

However - after Peg o' My Heart, in 1912, she went on and on and on ... doing bit parts, living in hotel rooms, doing Merchant of Venice in Toledo ... blah blah. A bleak life. Everyone kept thinking she was "making a comeback" - but the expectations were too high. There were many disappointments. This was a woman with a ton of demons. And none of the parts she got really exploited that tormented side of her, that beautiful poetic tragedy she had.

If you see what she actually LOOKS like, you will understand why it might have been a challenge for her to find the role that would really let her shine. She was not beautiful or tall and slim. She was not a leading lady. She was dumpy, a bit plain - but with eyes that glimmered, huge tragic eyes. In her own way, she is stunning, but she was hard to cast. Her "hit" had capitalized on her lilting fresh humorous youth, and when that was gone, she was adrift. Laurette Taylor, a person of Irish descent, was also the one, very very early on, who bemoaned the stereotyping of Irish people on stage. But I'll get to that in a minute.

She has an impish babyish face, she looks like a grinning mischievous cherub. This look was perfect for when she was a young vaudevillian, tap dancing her way through shows, making people laugh ... but as she grew older, as she became middle-aged, as her soul became darker, her looks did not fit her psyche.

Also - and this is just a theory of mine - American theatre had not yet caught up with her. Her gift was wayyyyyyyy ahead of its time. NOW there are so many venues for weird quirky actors - cable TV, independent film, whatever. But then - there was only Broadway and Hollywood. Laurette Taylor did not fit in. She did a couple of silent films, and footage of one of her screen tests does survive ... but again: she needed the role. This was not a generic actress. I mean, no actor is generic, at least no good actor - but she, more than most, needed a role to illuminate her genius. That role was a long time coming.

Throughout the 20s and 30s, Broadway was producing mainly drawing-room comedies, Philip Barry stuff - Kaufman & Hart stuff - all wonderful funny plays - but very very WASP-y, very upper-crust stuff. Laurette Taylor, with her blowsy curls, her blasted-open smile, her snarky wise-cracking mouth, did not fit in with the style of the times.

But all it took was one playwright.

One playwright to, first of all, usher in a new age in American theatre. But also - to write the role, THE role, that Laurette Taylor had been waiting for ... for almost FORTY YEARS.

It is one of the greatest theatrical comebacks of all time.

The script by the unknown playwright was sent to her, and she stayed up all night reading it, and the next morning called her assistant Eloise who had sent it to her, and Taylor was completely jubiliant: "I've found it, Eloise! I've found the play I've been waiting for!"

That playwright was Tennessee Williams, and the role was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie - in its inaugural production in 1946.

My acting teacher saw that original production and still talks about it. Nobody who saw it ever forgot it.

People changed the courses of their lives, after seeing Laurette Taylor playing Amanda Wingfield. Jose Quintero, a young kid, who eventually would become one of the most successful theatre directors of his day (and would direct many of Tennessee Williams' plays years later, although he was mainly known as the interpreter of Eugene O'Neill) - saw the first production, when it opened in Chicago, and it made him realize, finally, that he had to go into the theatre.

He says, "I walked all night long. I knew then something had made me feel whole."

God, how I wish I could have seen that performance. It is a watershed, a landmark. But I know that I don't even HAVE to have seen it to undertstand that I am affected by it, to know that it has, to some degree, created the entire landscape of the profession.

None of us stand alone, none of us re-discover the wheel.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. And Laurette Taylor was one of the biggest giants the American theatre has ever had.

It must have been something else - to see her in that part.

There is no record of what she did. But it's like descriptions from theatregoers centuries ago, telling about David Garrick's Hamlet or his Macbeth. I don't have to have actually seen him act, to know that he was extraordinary, and to love him. Laurette Taylor's work in The Glass Menagerie really means something to me - means something to a lot of people. Great actress.

Lyle Leverich wrote the first half of a biography of Tennessee Williams called Tom: The Unknown Tennesse Williams. Sadly for those of us who were waiting with baited breath for the second volume, Leverich died before completing it. But the first volume is enough to whet your whistle for all time. The book ends with The Glass Menagerie opening on Broadway, to stunning success, after its amazing trial run in Chicago. This was back when regional theatre really made a difference in this country. There are still regional theatres out there that are important - Steppenwolf, Trinity - but it is a completely different business now.

Here are some excerpts from Leverich's extraordinary book - about the rehearsal process, about Laurette Taylor in rehearsal. She had not worked in a long time. She was still remembered, by those people who remembered her success in Peg o' my Heart, but she had a bad reputation and everyone was nervous she would fall off the rails before the show opened. During rehearsals, she worried everybody for the first few weeks because she didn't seem to be DOING anything. She wasn't learning her lines - she held her script in her hands - she mumbled, fumbled, and seemed to not project anything, and she certainly wasn't up to par with the rest of the cast in terms of the performance-level. What was she doing? When would she START? They didn't understand her genius. She was percolating, that's all. She was letting the script work on her, rather than working on the script, imagining herself into the dreamspace in her head that was reserved for Amanda Wingfield. She wasn't obedient. Geniuses never are. She followed her own process. And while this is all well and good, it gave the cast and crew of the show some pretty bad moments, because how do you say to someone, "Could you please start ACTING?"

But let me back up a bit.

The cast gathers in New York, and travels together by train to Chicago - to begin rehearsals for Tennessee Williams (or Tom's) new play The Glass Menagerie.

Lyle Leverich writes:

On a cold Saturday, December 16, the company gathered at Pennsylvania Station. Tom and Donald came together. Jane Smith, who shortly before had returned to New York, picked up Margo at her hotel. Eddie Dowling was already at the station with Louis Singer...

On the following bitterly cold morning, the troupe disgorged from the train into Chicago's barnlike Union Station. The impression was hardly that of a winning team. With scarcely a nod at one another they scattered in all directions. Laurette's daughter described the occasion, saying Dowling and Singer went off arm in arm, ignoring their tiny star [Laurette Taylor], who stood hesitant and alone on the platform. "Julie, hatless and pinched-looking, flitted by as insubstantial as a puff of steam from any of the locomotives. Tony Ross, a six foot three protest against the cold and early hour, passed somnambulistically. The anxious author, who had forgotten something, dove back into the car and emerged again to feel the bleakness of the station like an unfriendly slap - a dismal portent of his play's reception. Desperately he longed for the sight of a familiar figure and at last saw one." Tennessee recalled the event: " 'Laurette!' I called her name and she turned and cried out mine. Then and there we joined forces." Together they went in search of a taxi. "It was Laurette who hailed it with an imperious wave of her ungloved hand, hesitation all gone as she sprang like a tiger out of her cloud of softness: such a light spring, but such an amazingly far one."

After this inauspicious beginning, rehearsals begin. From the start, they do not go well. Laurette Taylor, who I mentioned earlier, had not been in anything substantial for years. She was a serious drunk - who apparently WASN'T drinking at that moment - but everyone was terrified she would start. She wasn't interested in learning her lines, or trying to get scenes right, she barely had any interest (it seemed) in ACTING. People watched her rehearse, and suddenly everyone started getting very very scared.

Tom may have become aware of the hidden tiger in Laurette, but, like everyone else in the company, he was puzzled by her odd behavior at rehearsal. Using a large magnifying glass, she hovered over her script, peering at it and mumbling her lines - this, while the other actors had memorized their dialogue and were following Dowling's direction. At one point, Eddie was heard to mutter, "That woman is crucifying me," and the nervous Mr. Singer, looking in on one of the rehearsals, cried out, "Eddie! Eddie! You're ruining me!" Laurette's daughter wrote that her mother was simply "up to her old trick of watching the others, seemingly much more interested in them than her own part, neither learning her lines nor her business."

Tennessee remembered that Laurette appeared to know only a fraction of her lines, and these she was delivering in "a Southern accent which she had acquired from some long-ago black domestic." He was even more disconcerted when she said she was modeling her accent after his! Tom wrote to Donald Windham, complaining that Laurette was ad-libbing many of her speeches and that the play was beginning to sound more like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour.

To him, Laurette's "bright-eyed attentiveness to the other performances seemed a symptom of lunacy, and so did the rapturous manner of dear Julie." He was witnessing a characteristic of many of the theatre's great actors who were quick studies but painfully deliberate in their approach to a role. As Laurette's daughter explained, "She seemed blandly unconscious of the discomfort of the others ... Amanda [the role] fascinated her. She could see whole facets of the woman's life before the action of the play and after it was over." This is what her husband had taught her was the test of a good part. "The outer aspect of this inner search concerned her not at all."

But Laurette did not explain herself, she did not say to Dowling the director or Tennessee, "Listen, this is just my process - it's how I work - don't worry, I'll get it, I'll get it." She was a genius and you cannot expect geniuses to behave rationally. Finally Tennessee blows up.

Tom told Donald that he finally lost his temper when Laurette made some trifling changes. He said he screamed, "My God, what corn!" She railed that he was a fool, that she had been a star for forty years and had made a living as a writer which in her opinion was more than he had done. After they had returned from lunch, she "suddenly began giving a real acting performance - so good that Julie and I, the sentimental element in the company, wept."

The rehearsals stumble to a close - many problems with the set design, integration of the music, etc. And Laurette starts to drink, after rehearsals, as the pressure grows. Everybody is grim, scared.

Paul Bowles, the composer, flew out to Chicago to view the dress rehearsal, which was, by all accounts, a complete disaster.

Integrating the scenery changes with Mielziner's light and Paul Bowles's music cues was difficult enough, but, as Bowles recalled, the dress rehearsal was a nightmare. "I flew out to Chicago [and] arrived in a terrible blizzard, I remember. It was horrible. A traumatic experience. And the auditorium was cold. Laurette Taylor was on the bottle, unfortunately. Back on it, really. She had got off it with the first part of the rehearsals but suddenly the dress rehearsal coming up was too much." Laurette was nowhere to be found. Finally she was discovered by the janitor, "unconscious, down behind the furnace in the basement. And there was gloom, I can tell you, all over the theatre because no one thought she would be able to go on the next night."

Tennesee's mother, Edwina, on whom Amanda was based, flies into Chicago for the opening night. Which was December 26, 1944.

Still - on December 26 - things were not set, people were running around like lunatics, a doom-laden atmosphere.

The following is one of my favorite Laurette Taylor stories. I do not know why it touches me so deeply, and brings tears to my eyes, but it does.

On opening night, December 26, Laurette had disappeared again. They were forty minutes from curtain. While Dowling checked with her hotel and restrained Singer from calling the police, Jo Mielziner [the lighting designer] decided to try the basement, as Paul Bowles had. He recalled:

"Far down a passage I saw a light and heard the sound of running water. There, in a sort of janitor's storage and washroom, was Laurette Taylor, dressed in a rather soiled old dressing-gown with the sleeves rolled up, bending over a washtub, wringing out the dress that she was to wear in the second act. Her hands and arms were dripping with lavendar dye. I said, 'Laurette, can't somebody do this for you? You should be resting in your room or getting made up.' Her great, tragic, beautiful eyes smiled at me and she said, 'No, it's all done.' The dress was an important costume, a much-talked-about party frock. Early in the production I had assumed that the management would have something specifically designed; but pennies were being pinched to such an extent that the dress had been 'bought off the pile.' At the dress parade the day before, Tennessee Williams had commented that it was far from right, and so Laurette Taylor, on her own, had bought some dye and was trying to remedy matters."

She thrust the soggy clump of costume into Randy Echols' [the production stage manager] hands with the command, "Here, dry this." He met the challenge. "The sweating Echols constructed a dryer of bits and pieces backstage, played lights on it, fanned it, blew on it, went quietly mad."

I love Randy Echols.

And so - curtain-time approaches.

Before the curtain's rise, a small storm-buffeted audience had made it to the theatre, including Chicago's two most formidable critics, Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens. Edwina [Williams] recalled that "everything seemed against the play, even the weather. The streets were so ice-laden we could not find a taxi to take us to the Civic Theatre and had to walk. The gale blowing off Lake Michigan literally hurled us through the theatre door." Too nervous to sit and wait for the curtain, Tom went backstage, only to find the cast and crew even more gripped with fear than he was. Donald Windham arrived and sat next to Edwina...

Donald not only recognized Laurette Taylor's Southern accent as Tennessee's but he also felt that she had co-opted a good deal more and had modeled her performance on her careful observation of Tom. "Her sideways, suspicious glances at her children when she was displeased; her silences that spoke more than words; her bright obliviousness to the reality before her eyes when she was determined to show that she, at least, was agreeable, and her childish pleasure in the chance to charm and show off her best features..."

Edwina had not realized that Tom had written a play about HER, about his family, about his torment in regards to his sister who was mad, and eventually lobotomized. Laura is based on his sister Rose.

What Edwina was witnessing was in no real sense an autobiographical account of Tom's family life in St. Louis. It was a transmutation created by the artist who had taken refuge in the identity of Tennessee Williams - for it is true, as critic Frank Rich has said, that "anyone can write an autobiography, but only an artist knows how to remake his past so completely, by refracting it through a different aesthetic lens." For Edwina, the play was more dream than memory - a flux of disordered images of "loss, loss, loss." There could be no avoiding the similarities between Amanda Wingfield's travail and her own ... And there was the pain she had to feel in response to the reminders of Rose on that Christmas night, imprisoned in an asylum, with Laura's malformation acting as a metaphor for her daughter's enveloping madness. Then there was Tom's hope of escape - Tennessee's lifelong illusion - in pursuit of a father in love with long distances.

On one occasion, Tennessee said he could not remember his mother's reaction to the play; then on another he said that, as she sat listening to Laurette Taylor reciting her own utterances and aphorisms, "Mother began to sit up stiffer and stiffer. She looked like a horse eating briars. She was touching her throat and clasping her hands and quite unable to look at me." He thought that "what made it particularly hard for Mother to hear is that she is a tiny, delicate woman with great dignity and always managed to be extremely chic in dress, while Laurette Taylor invested the part with that blowzy, powerful quality of hers - and thank God she did, for it made the play."

That night, after the show, the cast and crew sat around waiting for the reviews to come in. Tennessee wanted to go to church, there was a midnight service down the street, but the weather was insane, freezing, a huge storm. And then - one by one, the reviews started coming in - "each more superlative than the last."

Claudia Cassidy said that the play "holds in its shadowed fragility the stamina of success" and she added "If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell." Ashton Stevens of the Herald-American called Menagerie "a lovely thing and an original thing. It has the courage of true poetry couched in colloquial prose. It is eerie and earthy in the same breath." He added that fifty years of first-nighting had provided him with few jolts so "miraculously electrical" as Laurette's portrayal and that he had not been so moved "since Eleanora Duse gave her last performance on this planet."

But still - the audience wasn't coming. The houses were small. Cassidy and Stevens began evangelists for the production.

...Claudia Cassidy ... returned for three successive performances ... Ashton Stevens virtually moved into the theatre. Everyone was faced with one of the most heartrending experiences in the theatre: helplessly watching a beautiful, highly praised production slowly expire because of the lack of public response.

This was about the time that theatre-people in New York started to make the trek out to Chicago to see what was going on.

Great playwright William Inge (who was unknown at this point, but a friend of Tennessee's) came out to see it. He describes his response:

"I sat in a half-filled theatre but I watched the most thrilling performance of the most beautiful American play I felt I had ever seen. I had the feeling at the time that what I was seeing would become an American classic...I was expecting a good play, yes, but I didn't know that I was going to encounter a work of genius ... The play itself was written so beautifully, like carved crystal and so it was a stunning experience for me and it shocked me alittle, too, to suddenly see this great work emerge from a person that I had come to know so casually."

Laurette Taylor's performance was being hailed as one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting the world had ever seen. But, as is typical with all great actors, she had huge humility and felt she could not take complete credit.

Laurette Taylor never lost an opportunity to divert the praise that was being heaped upon her to that "nice little guy," Tennessee Williams. She was always quick to remind her admirers that it was he, not she, who had written the lines that gave The Glass Menagerie its special power and beauty. And she told Tennessee, "It's a beautiful - a wonderful - a great play!"

For his part, Tennessee Williams always said that, as much as he regarded Laurette Taylor a personal friend, he never ceased to be in awe of her. "She had such a creative mind," he once remarked. "Something magical happened with Laurette. I used to stand backstage. There was a little peephole in the scenery, and I could be just about three feet from her, and when the lights hit her face, suddenly twenty years would drop off. An incandescent thing would happen in her face; it was really supernatural."

What was perhaps most extraordinary about The Glass Menagerie as a theatrical event was the meeting of these two great artists, one ending her career and the other beginning his. On that cold night of December 26, 1944, the convergence of two enormous theatre talents made theatre history. The performance itself became legendary, and the play became a classic in the literature of the American theatre.

The show continues its run in Chicago. Laurette Taylor has become the toast of the town. New York bigwigs fly in to see this new extraordinary show, and to see her performance, in particular. It is unclear at first, whether or not it will move on to New York. New York is the center of the universe. "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere..." Being a huge success in Chicago was wonderful and gratifying, for this sixty-year-old actress whom everyone had given up on for years. But she knew that ... Manhattan and the theatre audience and theatre critics in Manhattan were other animals altogether. Her anxiety grows.

As much as she was being lionized in Chicago and was enjoying it, Laurette knew the fawning for what it was: skittering leaves in the Windy City. Offstage now, she was becoming bored and edgy and more and more in need of a drink. Tom [Tennessee Williams] felt that what she actually needed was the seclusion of her own apartment and the protection of her young actress friend, Eloise. One who could understand Laurette's quicksilver disposition was Helen Hayes, then in Chicago playing in Harriet. She remembered Laurette saying over and over like an incantation, " 'I'm going to break this witch's curse.' "

Hayes said that Laurette was one of her idols and that they had been friends for a long time. "Harriet was closed on Sunday nights, and that was when I saw The Glass Menagerie. The play and Laurette were simply superb. Most nights after work, I would join her and Tennessee (they were very close) and Tony Ross, too, and we would go to their favorite bar. Laurette would order a double scotch, and when she saw my eyes widen, she reassured me that if she ordered a second drink, her deceased husband, Hartley, would come down and gently tap her on the shoulder. Being Irish, she believed that to be perfectly true."

Hayes remembered that Laurette's career had nose-dived and that hers was "a daring comeback attempt at age sixty ... One night the phone was ringing when I returned to my suite at the Ambassador. It was Laurette. 'I can't go on tomorrow,' she said in despair. 'My throat hurts, and I'm losing my voice. If I don't go on, everyone will think I'm drunk. If they say I'm drunk, I will get drunk and stay drunk till I die.' Her cry for help galvanized me." Hayes said that she always carried an electric steam kettle when she went on tour, to which she could add medicine. 'It had been helpful when I came down with bronchitis or laryngitis. I told Laurette I would come right away with the kettle ... I taxied downtown to the Sherman House. I stayed with her through most of the night, making sure she was breathing properly ... the next evening she gave a magnificent performance."

That image kills me. Helen Hayes steaming Laurette Taylor. Jesus.

The buzz around the show grew.

The word had spread to Broadway and Hollywood, and the wagers were on: Would she or would she not make it back? Everyone in the Chicago company was now, by mid-February, plainly nervous. The more Laurette was surrounded by flattery and the excitement of prominent visitors, the greater was the strain on her to keep from joining in the carouse around her. The marvelously witty and stylish actress Ina Claire was in the audience every night, and Tom wrote Audrey: "Everybody stops off here between Hollywood and New York, so our social life is terrific. We've had Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Katherine Helpburn, Terry Helburn, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic Lindsay and Crouse, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Luther Adler and God knows what all! Everybody has been favorable except Maxwell Anderson. He didn't like it."...

Katherine Hepburn's enthusiasm for The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, was such that she went straightway to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, saying that the studio should buy the play, assign George Cukor to direct, cast her as Laura and Spencer Tracy as the gentleman caller, and, above all, to capture on film Laurette's incomparable performance. She was to say later that Amanda Wingfield was Tennessee's "most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he has ever created."

But the project never came about, and so we will never know what Taylor's performance actually looked like. We can only take the words of all of the people who saw it as truth.

The play finally moves to New York. They uproot from Chicago, the glorious snowy town which had put Tennessee Williams on the map, made him a star, the town that catapulted Laurette Taylor, now a 60 year old woman, back into the limelight, after 40 years.

The pressure on the company is enormous. The show is going to be done at the Playhouse Theatre.

Laurette was well aware that both her disgrace in Alice and her comeback in Outward Bound had taken place on this same Playhouse stage. Across the street was the Cort Theatre, where her career had begun in the title role of Peg O' My Heart. She had much to look back upon, but the present confronting her was virtually unendurable. Back in her apartment, she found that her impulse was not to leave it and to seek escape in alcohol, but she also recognized this as an enemy that could bring upon her a terrible, final disagrace. In the hours before the curtain was to rise, she was under the watchful care of Eloise Sheldon, who had taken time off from her role in Harvey to be close to her.

The Glass Menagerie was scheduled to open on Saturday, March 31, Easter eve - a week after Tom's thirty-fourth birthday ... and the day before Laurette's sixty-first. Born a few weeks before Easter and reared in the symbolism of the Christian church, Tom saw this season as a special one, and he used the passage from crucifixion to resurrection as a constant theme in his work.

And so, opening night arrives. Everyone who is anyone showed up. It was a star-studded evening. Every powerhouse in town was in the audience.

That afternoon, there had been a technical run-through and the usual chaotic dress rehearsal. Audrey wrote:

I don't remember where the author was that last afternoon but I shan't ever forget sitting in an unairconditioned Playhouse Theatre. There was a frenetic veiling over everything - and everybody. The actors paced nervously before the run-through began. The light technicians tinkered with never-ending light cues and most of them came out just a little bit wrong. Having played their roles for months in Chicago meant absolutely nothing. This was the day of the New York opening. This was it. I kept remembering Liebling's remark, "You're only as good as the night they catch you."

Audrey recalled that when Laurette began her opening scene, she seemed under control "but after a few words in recognizable anguish she said, 'I'm sorry, I have to leave the stage. I'm going to be sick.' And sick she was offstage and then returned to try once more, a little whiter." The illness continued all afternoon.

The star of the show throwing up in between scenes was not the only problem during the technical run-through. "Tech"s are long and monotonous, and notoriously very tense. They are 10 hour days. At the end of the day, you do what is known as a "cue to cue". Which is self-explanatory. You run the couple of lines before a music or a light cue, the light cue is then executed, either correctly or not correctly, and then you run it again. Or you move on, if there are no mistakes. There are always mistakes. The actors have had three weeks to perfect their performances. The tech team has to do it in one day.

So The Glass Menagerie, with its musical cues, its projections on a screen in the back, its delicate light cues, was what is known as a "tech-heavy" show. The play relies upon these cues being executed in a sensitive intuitive way - it's PART of the show. It's how Tennessee wrote it. David Mamet's plays, by contrast, are pretty much: 'Lights up. Play happens. Lights out." Very different sensibility. And easier "techs".

Back to the disastrous "tech" on Easter Eve, 1946.

Paul Bowles's sensitive incidental score roared out when it should have sounded

(another quote from Audrey Wood) like circus music, away off in the distance of memory. Julie Haydon was trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but her concern for Miss Taylor was considerable. The two men, Eddie Dowling and Tony Ross, may have been scared to death, but they made a brave attempt at pretending they didn't care a damn what day it was.

The coproducer, Louis Singer, felt his way over to my side of the otherwise dark, empty auditorium where I was crouched down in my seat. Peering at me through the darkness, he said, 'Tell me - you are supposed to know a great deal about the theatre - is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you've ever seen in your life?' I nodded 'Yes.' I was too frightened to try and open my mouth.

During the rehearsal, Randy Echols had placed a bucket in the wings and, except for the two hours that Amanda was onstage, Laurette was leaning over it. Tony Ross later said, "It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance. We went home for a few hours for supper, but Eloise told me Laurette could eat nothing."

In her dressing room, Laurette had placed in front of her a large framed photograph of her [long-deceased] husband, Harley Manners.

Now we are into the final stretch. Curtain time is moments away. The description of what followed is so moving to me that tears blur my eyes as I type it out.

Eloise had [Laurette] dressed by the time of Randy's summons, "Curtain, Miss Taylor!" Tony Ross said that Mary Jean Copeland and Julie had to hlep her to her place onstage. "As the lights dimmed on Dowling at the end of his opening narration and began going up on the dining-room table we could hear Laurette's voice, 'Honey, don't push with your fingers ... And chew -- chew!' It seemed thin and uncertain. Slowly the lights came up full, and as she continued to speak, her voice gained strength. The audience didn't recognize her at first, and by the time they did she was well into her speech, and kept on going right through the applause. They soon quieted down." The bucket stayed in the wings, and "the few minutes she had between scenes, she was leaning over it retching horribly. There was nothing left inside her, poor thing, but onstage - good God! - what a performance she gave!"

In the final tableau of the play, with Tom departed, Amanda hovers protectively over a broken, deeply disturbed Laura, symbolizing what Tennessee Williams saw in his own mother: "Now that we cannot hear the mother's speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty."

At the end, the audience roared its approval. There were twenty-four curtain calls. As Laurette took her bows, tears streaked down her cheeks and she smiled somewhat tentatively while she held out the pleated frills of her worn blue party dress and curtsied. Her daughter said that she had the look of "a great ruin of a child gazing timorously upon a world she found to be infinitely pleasing."

At length, there were shouts of "Author! Author!" Eddie Dowling came down to the edge of the stage and beckoned Tom to come forward and take his place with the company. The young man who rose from the fourth row, his hair in a crew cut, his suit button missing, looked more like a junior in college than an eminent playwright. Standing in the aisle, he turned toward the stage and made a deep bow to the actors, his posterior in full view of the audience.

From this moment on, there was no turning back for Tom Williams. His prayers and those of his mother had been answered. Now he could give Edwina [his mother] financial independence and freedom from the bondage of her unhappy marriage. To his father's dismay, the little boy who could not put his blocks back in the box exactly as he had found them had become the artist who would rearrange them in a lasting architecture. And now there was no escape save into himself, and no place in the world he could go where he would not be known.

He had become Tennessee Williams.

I think my favorite part of that anecdote is that, in the moment he became a celebrity, in the moment Tom left Tom behind, to become Tennessee, his first act - the first thing he did - was bow to the ACTORS. Not to the audience who had been cheering for him, but to the company of actors who had made this success possible.

Now that is a class act.

Amanda Wingfield would be Laurette Taylor's final role. The play ran from March 31, 1945 - August 3, 1946.

Laurette Taylor died on December 7, 1946.

David Mermelstein writes:

Though she earned stardom playing the title role in "Peg o' My Heart" (1912), Taylor earned immortality much later as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" (1945). To hear those who saw her tell it, and there are still many who can, Taylor was a supreme conjurer, a mistress of the art that concealed art. Her unaffected portrayal of a struggling matron deludedly soldiering on has been described with awe as something so seemingly ordinary as to defy belief. "It could have been your mother" or "It was as if some woman off the street had stumbled into the theater." Alas, no film or recording of her performance exists. Only the legend survives -- of an old trouper giving what many consider the greatest dramatic performance of the 20th century, just before vanishing.

Martin Landau saw her in Glass Menagerie in New York and said that she "was almost like this woman had found her way into the theatre, through the stage door, and was sort of wandering around the kitchen." It was that real. (People say that about Marlon Brando's performance in Truckline Cafe - his debut. He came down the stairs in his first entrance, eating an apple, and Charles Durning, who saw the show, actually thought it was a stagehand who had wandered onstage, his behavior was so natural and real).

In the great documentary Broadway: The Golden Age (my post on it here) ranks and ranks of people talk about Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda. It was over 50 years ago now, almost 60 years, and the memory blazes bright and vivid. Nobody ever forgot it.

From a review of the documentary:

“Rise and shine! Rise and shine!”

I can hear it now, and in her voice, and so all his life could Tom Wingfield, also known as Thomas Lanier Williams, a/k/a Tennessee Williams, and so, as they talk to Rick McKay, can Gena Rowlands, Uta Hagen, Ben Gazzara, Fred Ebb, Charles Durning, and dozens of others.

Durning says it best: “I thought they’d pulled her in off the street.”

He is talking about, they are talking about, we are talking here about Laurette Taylor (1884-1946), whose performance as Amanda Wingfield. Tom’s mother, Laura’s mother, in the 1945 New York premiere of “The Glass Menagerie” at the Royale Theater on Broadway is and will always remain the American high-water mark of acting that goes beyond acting to be (that is, to seem) no acting at all.

“I saw her five times in ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” says the also great Uta Hagen whom we lost only some months ago, “and ten times in ‘Outward Bound.’ ”

“Cabaret” lyricist Fred Ebb saw “The Glass Menagerie” SEVEN times. In one instant that Ebb still carries in his gizzards, Laurette Taylor “turned around and pulled down her girdle, and I have never been so affected by a stage action in my whole life. It made me weep.”

“She could have been my mother,” says Ben Gazzara, speaking of the telephone scene in which a desperate Amanda Wingfield tries to get a female acquaintance to renew a magazine subscription at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. “It makes you laugh and cry in the same breath. How do you do that?” says Gazzara. “Only PEOPLE do that. I think we’ve all been striving to be her, one way or another.”

In 2005, Jesse Green wrote in the New York Times:

People, especially actors, who saw Laurette Taylor play Amanda Wingfield in the original production of "The Glass Menagerie" in 1945 typically say it was the best performance ever offered on the American stage. Tennessee Williams compared her radiance in the role (which he had based on his mother) to the "greatest lines of poetry" and mourned that her reputation would be limited to the "testimony and inspiration" of those who saw her. That's mostly true; Taylor appeared in only three films, all silent, and died shortly after leaving the road company of "Menagerie" in 1946. But something of what made her Amanda so memorable was captured by Eileen Darby (1916-2004), a photographer who worked Broadway from 1940 to 1964, producing some of the signal theatrical images of the period: Marlon Brando menacing a thrilled but terrified Jessica Tandy in "A Streetcar Named Desire"; Carol Channing, framed by a halo of hair and feathers, at the top of the Harmonia Gardens stairs in "Hello, Dolly!"

Some 250 of these images are featured in "Stars on Stage: Eileen Darby and Broadway's Golden Age," to be published by Bulfinch Press this month; many are included in an exhibition of Darby's work that opened Tuesday at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. None is more valuable and unexpected than this series of 12 frames of Taylor in "Menagerie" - a "key sheet" from which the show's press agent might choose a publicity shot. It records one of Amanda's efforts to earn extra money by selling renewal subscriptions to a "magazine for matrons" called The Home-maker's Companion. The action, caught at about one shot every five seconds, is so legibly written on Taylor's face that it can be matched nearly frame by frame to the Scene 3 monologue. Frame 2: "Ida Scott? ... We missed you at the D.A.R. last Monday!" Frame 4: "You're a Christian martyr, yes, that's what you are." Frame 7: "That wonderful new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper is getting off to such an exciting start." Frame 9: "Go take a look in the oven and I'll hold the wire!" Frame 11: "I think she's hung up!" And then, in Frame 12, a fleeting look of betrayal and confusion aimed at the telephone itself: a reminder that Amanda's runaway husband was a telephone man who "fell in love with long-distance."

After Taylor's own husband (her second) died in 1928, she went on a 10-year bender she later called "the longest wake in history." That's on her face, too, and one of the things Darby's photographs so memorably record is a time when Amanda could be played (indeed, could only be played) by a plain, 61-year-old warhorse whose suffering, far from being a disfigurement requiring erasure, was the essence of the gift she brought to the stage.

Laurette Taylor, before she passed away, wrote an essay about acting that is precious to me. It's not often that an actor can actually talk about he or she does, without sounding precious or like they want to be congratulated for their cleverness. But in Taylor's essay, she comes close to actually expressing magic, and yet at the same time, this lady was Irish Catholic, okay? She couldn't be airy-fairy if she tried. I know of what I speak. James Joyce said, "In Ireland Catholicism is black magic." Laurette Taylor here sounds practical, yet full of black magic. It is that very interesting mix that seems to me very particular to the Irish sensibility - the Irish artistic sensibility is what I mean. Laurette Taylor, in her long career, experienced the ups and downs, lows and highs, at a more intense frequency than most. She was not a cynical woman. She didn't have a "well, that's the way life is" bone in her body. She was not a realist. Her fantasies and dreams and hopes are part and parcel of why she turned to the bottle. Reality was too much for her. Reality is too much for a lot of geniuses. But when she was able to harness all of that light and fire and hope and loss ... nobody could touch her. How many performances have you seen where you remember the blocking 60 years later? Not too many. That was what Laurette Taylor did in Glass Menagerie. The gestures revealed the subtext. So often gestures are belabored or planned-out by the actor. "If I take off my hat on this line, this will show what I am really feeling ..." That's good stage-craft, I don't mean to knock it ... but then there are the geniuses ... who cannot HELP but reveal the subtext. The subtext is not some intellectual bit of playwriting - it is IN them, they have embodied it, they have used the rehearsal time to step into that deep pool and LIVE there, so no matter what they do: pick up the phone, pour someone a drink, fix their makeup - it reveals the subtext. My acting teacher in college always used to talk to us actors about finding "the pulse of the playwright". We must always be close to that pulse when we act. Because the job of the actor is twofold: give a good performance and also reveal the play.

Without Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda, the actual play of Glass Menagerie might not have been revealed. She WAS Tennessee Williams up there. And she didn't plan on that, or tackle it intellectually ... it was just how she worked. She didn't know any other way.

Here is Laurette Taylor's essay about the art of acting:

The Quality Most Needed - by Laurette Taylor

I have been asked to discuss, for the benefit of those who may go on the stage, the qualities which are most important as elements of success. If merely the financial or popular success of a woman star is meant, I should say that beauty is more essential than magnetism. But if by success you mean all that is implied by the magical word Art - success in the sense of Bernhardt, Duse and Ellen Terry are successes - I should say most emphatically the reverse. And I should add that imagination is more important than either.

Mere beauty is unimportant; in many cases it proves a genuine handicap. Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin.

Beauty is not all-important as an asset, even when the star is not anxious to achieve true greatness. Many of our most charming comediennes are not pretty women. Rather, they are women of great charm and personality. I cannot for the moment recall a single great actress who is a beauty. At least not in the popularly accepted idea of what constitutes beauty.

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

Beauty as I understand it does not mean simple prettiness, but stands for something allusive and subtle. The obvious seldom charms after one has had to live close to it for any length of time. Being all on the surface, there is nothing left to exhilarate, once the surface has been explored. On the other hand, the beauty which emanates from within becomes more enchanting upon close acquaintance. It is constantly revealing itself in some new guise and becomes a continual source of joy to the fortunate persons who have the privilege of meeting it frequently.

That is beauty of the imagination, and that beauty all the really great actresses have.

The case of [Sarah] Bernhardt is as good an example as one would wish. In her youth, especially, she was the very apotheosis of ugliness; still, through the power of her rich imagination that glorified her every thought and act, she held her audiences in the hollow of her hand. It is the strength and richness of her wonderful creative mind tha tmakes it possible for her to present the amazing illusion of youth which she does even today.

It isn't beauty or personality or magnetism that makes a really great actress. It is imagination, though these other qualities are useful.

You see a queer little child sitting in the middle of a mud puddle. She attracts you and holds your interest. You even smile in sympathy. Why? Simply because that child is exercising her creative imagination. She is attributing to mud pies the delicious qualities of the pies which mother makes in the kitchen. You may not stop to realize that this is what is going on in the child's mind, but unconsciously it is communicated to you. It is the quality of imagination that has held your attention ...

We create in the imagination the character we wish to express. If it is real and vital to us in imagination we will be able to express it with freedom and surety. But we must conceive it as a whole before we begin to express it.

There will be those who will disagree with me and say that magnetism presupposes imagination. This is a mistake. Many magnetic actresses are wholly lacking in imagination, their hold upon the public resting chiefly upon personality and charm and beauty. Have you ever gone to a tea party where you met some very magnetic woman who radiated charm, who not only held your attention but exhilarated you until you became impatient to see this scintillating creature on the stage, where you might realize the fullness of her wonder? And have you not felt, when your opportunity came and you saw her on the stage at last, the disappointment of realizing a wooden lady with a beautiful mask for a face, speaking faultlessly articulated lines - an actress who rose desperately to the big moments of her part, and who never for a moment let you forget that it was she, that actress, whom you saw, not the character whom she was portraying? There may have been splendid acting but you were conscious of the fact that it was acting. There was no illusion. She was conscious at the big climax that she was acting this part and that she must reach this climax. She was acting as much to herself as to you.

That is not the art of the great actress.

The imaginative actress builds a picture, using all her heart and soul and brain. She builds this picture not alone for the people out in front but for herself. She believes in it and she makes the people across the footlights believe in it. Unless she has done this she has failed. She must stimulate the imagination of the audience. An actress should not only be able to play a part; she should be able to play with it. Above all, she should not allow anything to stand between her and the thing she is expressing.

How often does an actress play a part so as to leave you with the feeling that you have so intimate a knowledge of the character that you could imagine its conduct in any position, aside from the situations involved in the action of the play? Unless this happens, you feel that after all you have seen a limited portrayal of the character and you realize that though the acting was practically flawless there was something missing. And, in nine cases out of ten, that is because the woman playing the part did not use any imagination. She was entirely bound by the tradition of the theatre. She did everything just as it would have been done by anyone else on the stage. This is fatal.

You feel untouched by the play because it was not made real to you.

The artist looks for the unusual. She watches everyone, always searching for the unusual in clothes, in manner, in gesture. The imaginative actress will even remember that the French have characteristics other than the shrug!

Think of the number of times that there have been Irish plays, of the number of times that the Irish character has been used in the working out of a plot. Yet never, to my knowledge, has an Irishman been played on the stage. (This excepts, of course, Lady Gregory's players and Guy Standing's rendition of a current Irish-American role.) Real Irishmen have never been played. The Irish can be the most melancholy people on the face of the earth, yet the traditional stage Irish have been lilting colleens and joking Paddies.

The most interesting thing to me in acting is the working out of the character itself, the finding of what which is uncommon and the small, seemingly insignificant trait which will unconsciously make an appeal to the audience and establish the human appeal. Too much importance is laid on clothes. In the main, I think that all clothes hamper unless they express the character. Personally, I detest 'straight' parts for that reason. They necessitate the clothes that make me self-conscious - or, rather "clothes conscious".

I want to get right inside the character and act from the heart as well as from the head. That is impossible unless one is free from outside interference.

I think actresses pay too much attention to the tradition of acting. That is a great mistake. It cramps creative instinct. I received a good deal of criticism for my walk in The Bird of Paradise. Some of the critics said I should be taught how to walk across the stage. Of course I paid no attention to that. My walk was the walk of the barefoot Italians who carry loads on their heads, and I had learned it from them. It was certainly not the traditional stage walk, but we are living in a time when simplicity and truth are the watchwords of the theatre. The traditional stage walk would not have fitted the character I played.

The stage has come to a period of simplicity. A few years ago the direct attitude adopted by the younger actresses of today toward their roles would have been considered ridiculous. The changes have been positive but subtle, and the actress without concentration has been unable to discern them. They are the ones who are still sparring for time in their emotional scenes, using the traditional tricks to express grief, joy, surprise, chagrin; and they wonder why they are sitting at home without engagements. They cannot comprehend that the very little basket of tricks which made them the idols of a few years ago fails utterly to get results today ...

The time has come when we may as well realize that we can no longer give a filmy portrayal of emotion and pad it out wiht stereotyped pieces of "business". The younger actresses of today express the elemental emotions as the elemental person would express them in real life. There is no such thing as a compromise in the logical development of a character in order to make a theatrical effect ...

Too few actresses follow their instinct. I think instinct is the direct connection with truth.

It is not enough to know just what you are to do yourself in the action of a piece; you must know also the exact relation you must bear to every other character in the play.

For instance, take the business of dying. You must in your imagination realize not only the fact that you are dying but the effect which your death will have on every character related to your part. You know that you are not dying and the audience knows it, but in your imagination you must really believe you are. The business of dying becomes actual to you; also, you compel the audience to believe in you by the very sincerity of your attitude.

This trait is really remarkable in Maude Adams. Recall her work in Chantecler. Without her tremendous imagination to gild her impersonation, this frail little woman would have been hopeless in the part. Yet through her marvelous richness of imagination she produced the illusion of bigness that many women better fitted physically could not have done.

One would never say that Maude Adams is beautiful, in the sense that she is pretty or has a beautiful physique; but she has charm, magnetism and imagination. These three make a beauty that transcends mere beauty.

Beauty, personality, and magnetism are not important in the equipment of a star, when compared to the creative faculty of imagination. The first three qualities are valuable adjuncts, and no one should sneeze at them. But you might get along without the slightest beauty and little or no personal magnetism if you were generously endowed with the imaginative mind.

I haven't even talked about the book! Her daughter Marguerite Courtney wrote this life of her mother, and I consider it to be essential reading. Not only does it detail Laurette Taylor's journey (with honesty, freshness, and specificity) - but it gives a snapshot of an American theatre scene that no longer exists. Courtney obviously loves her mother, but this is not the ravings of a fangirl. She tells it like it is. Wonderful book. Since my post has been all about Glass Menagerie, I will choose an excerpt from when she was playing in Peg o' My Heart and had become a star. The great stage actress Sarah Bernhardt was her idol - and this excerpt has to do with the two of them meeting.

I find Bernhardt's first-impression assessment of Laurette Taylor fascinating and quite prophetic. She saw in Taylor, who was, at that time, playing in a comedy - known for how funny she was - a "tragique actress". She saw. She saw the sadness - and basically saw Amanda Wingfield in her, although Amanda would not come into Taylor's life for another 40 years. Fascinating. Very intuitive of Bernhardt. And her prophecy that Taylor would be "the foremost actress" of America was right on - only her timeline was off by 35 years. Amazing.

Great book.

EXCERPT FROM Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter, by Marguerite Courtney

By November, 1913, Laurette had broken the record for continuous performances. Maude Adams was the previous title-holder with three hundred performances as Lady Babbie in "The Little Minister" in 1897. Laurette was growing restive. Peg was "all right for a starter" she said but she hadn't worked all these years for success to have it imprison her forever in one role. She was, as Burns Mantle put it, "threatened with the curse of popularity".

She would as soon have joined the waxwork figures of Eden Musee as let her fame rest with "Peg". Her admiration was for the innovators, like Alla Nazimova who introduced Ibsen's plays to New York. "There was courage," said Laurette, "courage of one who was willing and able to tread unknown paths." Sarah Bernhardt was her idol. Playing a young man in "L'Aiglon" at the age of fifty-five with astounding success, triumphing in a dozen roles of every variety. "I studied Bernhardt," said Lauette; "no, not studied her, I drank her in."

There was no question in Laurette's mind which course she was going to pursue in the theatre.

Laurette's first meeting with the great French tragedienne was unpropitious. Bernhardt was playing scenes from her successes at the Palace Theatre in the spring of 1913. As a publicity stunt a high-powered press agent sought three prominent Broadway actresses to walk on with her in a scene from "Phedre". Only Laurette and Marguerite Clark, then starring in "Prunella" accepted. A stenographer in the agent's office was recruited at the last minute as the third "prominent actress". The three women were pinned into ill-fitting robes over once-pink tights; wreathes of enormous pink roses were placed on their heads, and on their feet shapeless gilt sandals. Then they were taken to the great one's dressing room. The ailing Bernhardt apparently had not even bothered to inquire as to the identity of the two young actresses or what they were playing in New York, but on meeting Laurette a spark of interest lit for a moment behind the curiously slanted, catlike eyes.

"Tragic actress?" she asked in English.

"No, madame. Comedienne."

Bernhardt looked puzzled, muttered something in French, then swept her hand across Laurette's eyes. "Non - non!" she said emphatically. "Tragique actress!"

The brief appearance of Phedre's handmaidens was as near farcical as the costumes, but Laurette remembered only the matchless thrill of "walking on" with Bernhardt, the weight of those "divine bones" leaning on her arm as the procession slowly made its way to Phedre's throne.

A week later Bernhardt sent word to the Cort that she would like to see Laurette's play. Because of Madame's daily matinees a special performance of "Peg" was arranged for eleven o'clock in the morning. A souvenir program was printed in French, an armchair placed in the aisle. At the sight of the chair Bernhardt had a tantrum, insisting on sitting in an aisle seat; there, bright-eyed and eager as a child she waited for the curtain to rise. Thus, for the immortal Sarah, Laurette played her immortal "Peg".

At Bernhardt's specific request not a line of publicity was given to the event. Over her signature had been issued a bewildering number of statements on everything from the health value of lemon juice before breakfast to the plight of the immigrant. Witnessing Laurette's Peg the French actress seemed to touch bedrock in publicity quicksands. She wrote in an article syndicated all over the country:

One young artist in New York has not allowed herself to be blinded. She has worked hard and is still working, although she is already a very agreeable comedienne, possessing humor, emotion, and a rare thing for her age - power. I speak of Laurette Taylor who will become within five years the foremost actress of this country ... All aspirants for the stage should take this young actress as their model.

Three years later, on another farewell tour, Bernhardt again asked to see Laurette play. This time she was grievously ill and, because of the ailing leg, forced to use a wheel chair. To permit her to retire backstage between acts, the two sets of "The Harp of Life" were moved from the Globe to the Empire where she was playing. The performance was given at one p.m. This time there was no embargo on press or public and the audience came by special invitation. It was one of the most brilliant professional assemblages in New York theatre history.

Due to difficulties in getting Madame's wheel chair in and out of the box, prolonged retirements backstage to sip hot milk and rest, the second act was not finished until almost six o'clock. Bernhardt stayed in her place until the audience had left, then asked the company to play the last act. But there wasn't time. She thanked the cast, patted Laurette's cheek, and was wheeled off to prepare for her evening performance.

Asked what it was like to play for Bernhardt, Laurette said, "It was like playing to royalty and a little child."

Bernhardt was Laurette's lodestar, the great inspiration of her acting life. "But I could never be a Bernhardt," she once said. "There just isn't enough of me."

The Books: "Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter" (Marguerite Courtney)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter, by Marguerite Courtney

Laurette Taylor had a long (and rather checkered) stage career - Broadway and regional - starting in 1909 - a career where her really big hit, the thing she was known for was Peg o' my Heart in 1912. It had been a personal triumph. Peg o' my Heart was such a success she became the toast of New York. She was still a kid. Success came very early - and then faded almost just as quickly. But she kept going, she kept trying, kept trying to find the next Peg o' my Heart.

They did a revival of that show, years later, and she was in it ... but she was only grasping at a long-ago glory. Nobody cared anymore.

There is a sadness in Laurette Taylor's face, a wistful longing for ... something ... not fame, not that exactly ... perhaps it was comfort, or respect, or finding a place in the theatre she could call home. She was a heartbreaking character, much beloved and revered ... with demons that took her over from time to time (she was a falling-down black-out drunk), and a certain amount of poetry and mischief that elevated her when she needed it. Or no, not when she needed it. There were decades in there where she could not access her own essence - the thing she needed to bring to the stage ... What she needed was a role. What she needed was THE role to help bring her back to life.

Enter young Tennessee Williams with this new play he had written called The Glass Menagerie.

At the time he entered her life, she was not in good shape. She was forgotten. A lush. A 60-year-old recluse drunk.

Her beloved second husband J. Hartley Manners (who had written Peg o' My Heart) died in 1928 - and she went on what was, for all intents and purposes, a 10-year bender. By the end of that decade, her entire fortune was gone, and everybody who had loved her, who had thought she was going to be the next biggest star, assumed that she must have died.

She was a wild-woman, and one of the most quotable of people. I love reading about her. She sounds like a hoot. I feel like I would have loved to know her.

My favorite Laurette Taylor anecdote (or one of them) is this:

Taylor was in the midst of doing a play, a play which was not a success. Nobody was showing up and it was universally panned. After one of the performances, Taylor went to a party, where I am sure she began to imbibe. She struck up a conversation with a young man, also at the party. They talked for a bit, and then he left, to go mingle. Taylor immediately turned to the hostess and said, "That man walked out on me tonight at the theatre!!"

The hostess, disbelieving, said, "Are you sure? How do you know?"

Taylor snapped, "I sometimes forget a face, but I never forget a back!"

Taylor also described the 10-year drinking binge after the death of her husband as "the longest wake in history."

She was a tough cookie, this one. And yet people talked (and still talk, oh my GOD, do they still talk) about her gift on the stage.

However - after Peg o' My Heart, in 1912, she went on and on and on ... doing bit parts, living in hotel rooms, doing Merchant of Venice in Toledo ... blah blah. A bleak life. Everyone kept thinking she was "making a comeback" - but the expectations were too high. There were many disappointments. This was a woman with a ton of demons. And none of the parts she got really exploited that tormented side of her, that beautiful poetic tragedy she had.

If you see what she actually LOOKS like, you will understand why it might have been a challenge for her to find the role that would really let her shine. She was not beautiful or tall and slim. She was not a leading lady. She was dumpy, a bit plain - but with eyes that glimmered, huge tragic eyes. In her own way, she is stunning, but she was hard to cast. Her "hit" had capitalized on her lilting fresh humorous youth, and when that was gone, she was adrift. Laurette Taylor, a person of Irish descent, was also the one, very very early on, who bemoaned the stereotyping of Irish people on stage. But I'll get to that in a minute.

She has an impish babyish face, she looks like a grinning mischievous cherub. This look was perfect for when she was a young vaudevillian, tap dancing her way through shows, making people laugh ... but as she grew older, as she became middle-aged, as her soul became darker, her looks did not fit her psyche.

Also - and this is just a theory of mine - American theatre had not yet caught up with her. Her gift was wayyyyyyyy ahead of its time. NOW there are so many venues for weird quirky actors - cable TV, independent film, whatever. But then - there was only Broadway and Hollywood. Laurette Taylor did not fit in. She did a couple of silent films, and footage of one of her screen tests does survive ... but again: she needed the role. This was not a generic actress. I mean, no actor is generic, at least no good actor - but she, more than most, needed a role to illuminate her genius. That role was a long time coming.

Throughout the 20s and 30s, Broadway was producing mainly drawing-room comedies, Philip Barry stuff - Kaufman & Hart stuff - all wonderful funny plays - but very very WASP-y, very upper-crust stuff. Laurette Taylor, with her blowsy curls, her blasted-open smile, her snarky wise-cracking mouth, did not fit in with the style of the times.

But all it took was one playwright.

One playwright to, first of all, usher in a new age in American theatre. But also - to write the role, THE role, that Laurette Taylor had been waiting for ... for almost FORTY YEARS.

It is one of the greatest theatrical comebacks of all time.

The script by the unknown playwright was sent to her, and she stayed up all night reading it, and the next morning called her assistant Eloise who had sent it to her, and Taylor was completely jubiliant: "I've found it, Eloise! I've found the play I've been waiting for!"

That playwright was Tennessee Williams, and the role was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie - in its inaugural production in 1946.

My acting teacher saw that original production and still talks about it. Nobody who saw it ever forgot it.

People changed the courses of their lives, after seeing Laurette Taylor playing Amanda Wingfield. Jose Quintero, a young kid, who eventually would become one of the most successful theatre directors of his day (and would direct many of Tennessee Williams' plays years later, although he was mainly known as the interpreter of Eugene O'Neill) - saw the first production, when it opened in Chicago, and it made him realize, finally, that he had to go into the theatre.

He says, "I walked all night long. I knew then something had made me feel whole."

God, how I wish I could have seen that performance. It is a watershed, a landmark. But I know that I don't even HAVE to have seen it to undertstand that I am affected by it, to know that it has, to some degree, created the entire landscape of the profession.

None of us stand alone, none of us re-discover the wheel.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. And Laurette Taylor was one of the biggest giants the American theatre has ever had.

It must have been something else - to see her in that part.

There is no record of what she did. But it's like descriptions from theatregoers centuries ago, telling about David Garrick's Hamlet or his Macbeth. I don't have to have actually seen him act, to know that he was extraordinary, and to love him. Laurette Taylor's work in The Glass Menagerie really means something to me - means something to a lot of people. Great actress.

Lyle Leverich wrote the first half of a biography of Tennessee Williams called Tom: The Unknown Tennesse Williams. Sadly for those of us who were waiting with baited breath for the second volume, Leverich died before completing it. But the first volume is enough to whet your whistle for all time. The book ends with The Glass Menagerie opening on Broadway, to stunning success, after its amazing trial run in Chicago. This was back when regional theatre really made a difference in this country. There are still regional theatres out there that are important - Steppenwolf, Trinity - but it is a completely different business now.

Here are some excerpts from Leverich's extraordinary book - about the rehearsal process, about Laurette Taylor in rehearsal. She had not worked in a long time. She was still remembered, by those people who remembered her success in Peg o' my Heart, but she had a bad reputation and everyone was nervous she would fall off the rails before the show opened. During rehearsals, she worried everybody for the first few weeks because she didn't seem to be DOING anything. She wasn't learning her lines - she held her script in her hands - she mumbled, fumbled, and seemed to not project anything, and she certainly wasn't up to par with the rest of the cast in terms of the performance-level. What was she doing? When would she START? They didn't understand her genius. She was percolating, that's all. She was letting the script work on her, rather than working on the script, imagining herself into the dreamspace in her head that was reserved for Amanda Wingfield. She wasn't obedient. Geniuses never are. She followed her own process. And while this is all well and good, it gave the cast and crew of the show some pretty bad moments, because how do you say to someone, "Could you please start ACTING?"

But let me back up a bit.

The cast gathers in New York, and travels together by train to Chicago - to begin rehearsals for Tennessee Williams (or Tom's) new play The Glass Menagerie.

Lyle Leverich writes:

On a cold Saturday, December 16, the company gathered at Pennsylvania Station. Tom and Donald came together. Jane Smith, who shortly before had returned to New York, picked up Margo at her hotel. Eddie Dowling was already at the station with Louis Singer...

On the following bitterly cold morning, the troupe disgorged from the train into Chicago's barnlike Union Station. The impression was hardly that of a winning team. With scarcely a nod at one another they scattered in all directions. Laurette's daughter described the occasion, saying Dowling and Singer went off arm in arm, ignoring their tiny star [Laurette Taylor], who stood hesitant and alone on the platform. "Julie, hatless and pinched-looking, flitted by as insubstantial as a puff of steam from any of the locomotives. Tony Ross, a six foot three protest against the cold and early hour, passed somnambulistically. The anxious author, who had forgotten something, dove back into the car and emerged again to feel the bleakness of the station like an unfriendly slap - a dismal portent of his play's reception. Desperately he longed for the sight of a familiar figure and at last saw one." Tennessee recalled the event: " 'Laurette!' I called her name and she turned and cried out mine. Then and there we joined forces." Together they went in search of a taxi. "It was Laurette who hailed it with an imperious wave of her ungloved hand, hesitation all gone as she sprang like a tiger out of her cloud of softness: such a light spring, but such an amazingly far one."

After this inauspicious beginning, rehearsals begin. From the start, they do not go well. Laurette Taylor, who I mentioned earlier, had not been in anything substantial for years. She was a serious drunk - who apparently WASN'T drinking at that moment - but everyone was terrified she would start. She wasn't interested in learning her lines, or trying to get scenes right, she barely had any interest (it seemed) in ACTING. People watched her rehearse, and suddenly everyone started getting very very scared.

Tom may have become aware of the hidden tiger in Laurette, but, like everyone else in the company, he was puzzled by her odd behavior at rehearsal. Using a large magnifying glass, she hovered over her script, peering at it and mumbling her lines - this, while the other actors had memorized their dialogue and were following Dowling's direction. At one point, Eddie was heard to mutter, "That woman is crucifying me," and the nervous Mr. Singer, looking in on one of the rehearsals, cried out, "Eddie! Eddie! You're ruining me!" Laurette's daughter wrote that her mother was simply "up to her old trick of watching the others, seemingly much more interested in them than her own part, neither learning her lines nor her business."

Tennessee remembered that Laurette appeared to know only a fraction of her lines, and these she was delivering in "a Southern accent which she had acquired from some long-ago black domestic." He was even more disconcerted when she said she was modeling her accent after his! Tom wrote to Donald Windham, complaining that Laurette was ad-libbing many of her speeches and that the play was beginning to sound more like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour.

To him, Laurette's "bright-eyed attentiveness to the other performances seemed a symptom of lunacy, and so did the rapturous manner of dear Julie." He was witnessing a characteristic of many of the theatre's great actors who were quick studies but painfully deliberate in their approach to a role. As Laurette's daughter explained, "She seemed blandly unconscious of the discomfort of the others ... Amanda [the role] fascinated her. She could see whole facets of the woman's life before the action of the play and after it was over." This is what her husband had taught her was the test of a good part. "The outer aspect of this inner search concerned her not at all."

But Laurette did not explain herself, she did not say to Dowling the director or Tennessee, "Listen, this is just my process - it's how I work - don't worry, I'll get it, I'll get it." She was a genius and you cannot expect geniuses to behave rationally. Finally Tennessee blows up.

Tom told Donald that he finally lost his temper when Laurette made some trifling changes. He said he screamed, "My God, what corn!" She railed that he was a fool, that she had been a star for forty years and had made a living as a writer which in her opinion was more than he had done. After they had returned from lunch, she "suddenly began giving a real acting performance - so good that Julie and I, the sentimental element in the company, wept."

The rehearsals stumble to a close - many problems with the set design, integration of the music, etc. And Laurette starts to drink, after rehearsals, as the pressure grows. Everybody is grim, scared.

Paul Bowles, the composer, flew out to Chicago to view the dress rehearsal, which was, by all accounts, a complete disaster.

Integrating the scenery changes with Mielziner's light and Paul Bowles's music cues was difficult enough, but, as Bowles recalled, the dress rehearsal was a nightmare. "I flew out to Chicago [and] arrived in a terrible blizzard, I remember. It was horrible. A traumatic experience. And the auditorium was cold. Laurette Taylor was on the bottle, unfortunately. Back on it, really. She had got off it with the first part of the rehearsals but suddenly the dress rehearsal coming up was too much." Laurette was nowhere to be found. Finally she was discovered by the janitor, "unconscious, down behind the furnace in the basement. And there was gloom, I can tell you, all over the theatre because no one thought she would be able to go on the next night."

Tennesee's mother, Edwina, on whom Amanda was based, flies into Chicago for the opening night. Which was December 26, 1944.

Still - on December 26 - things were not set, people were running around like lunatics, a doom-laden atmosphere.

The following is one of my favorite Laurette Taylor stories. I do not know why it touches me so deeply, and brings tears to my eyes, but it does.

On opening night, December 26, Laurette had disappeared again. They were forty minutes from curtain. While Dowling checked with her hotel and restrained Singer from calling the police, Jo Mielziner [the lighting designer] decided to try the basement, as Paul Bowles had. He recalled:

"Far down a passage I saw a light and heard the sound of running water. There, in a sort of janitor's storage and washroom, was Laurette Taylor, dressed in a rather soiled old dressing-gown with the sleeves rolled up, bending over a washtub, wringing out the dress that she was to wear in the second act. Her hands and arms were dripping with lavendar dye. I said, 'Laurette, can't somebody do this for you? You should be resting in your room or getting made up.' Her great, tragic, beautiful eyes smiled at me and she said, 'No, it's all done.' The dress was an important costume, a much-talked-about party frock. Early in the production I had assumed that the management would have something specifically designed; but pennies were being pinched to such an extent that the dress had been 'bought off the pile.' At the dress parade the day before, Tennessee Williams had commented that it was far from right, and so Laurette Taylor, on her own, had bought some dye and was trying to remedy matters."

She thrust the soggy clump of costume into Randy Echols' [the production stage manager] hands with the command, "Here, dry this." He met the challenge. "The sweating Echols constructed a dryer of bits and pieces backstage, played lights on it, fanned it, blew on it, went quietly mad."

I love Randy Echols.

And so - curtain-time approaches.

Before the curtain's rise, a small storm-buffeted audience had made it to the theatre, including Chicago's two most formidable critics, Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens. Edwina [Williams] recalled that "everything seemed against the play, even the weather. The streets were so ice-laden we could not find a taxi to take us to the Civic Theatre and had to walk. The gale blowing off Lake Michigan literally hurled us through the theatre door." Too nervous to sit and wait for the curtain, Tom went backstage, only to find the cast and crew even more gripped with fear than he was. Donald Windham arrived and sat next to Edwina...

Donald not only recognized Laurette Taylor's Southern accent as Tennessee's but he also felt that she had co-opted a good deal more and had modeled her performance on her careful observation of Tom. "Her sideways, suspicious glances at her children when she was displeased; her silences that spoke more than words; her bright obliviousness to the reality before her eyes when she was determined to show that she, at least, was agreeable, and her childish pleasure in the chance to charm and show off her best features..."

Edwina had not realized that Tom had written a play about HER, about his family, about his torment in regards to his sister who was mad, and eventually lobotomized. Laura is based on his sister Rose.

What Edwina was witnessing was in no real sense an autobiographical account of Tom's family life in St. Louis. It was a transmutation created by the artist who had taken refuge in the identity of Tennessee Williams - for it is true, as critic Frank Rich has said, that "anyone can write an autobiography, but only an artist knows how to remake his past so completely, by refracting it through a different aesthetic lens." For Edwina, the play was more dream than memory - a flux of disordered images of "loss, loss, loss." There could be no avoiding the similarities between Amanda Wingfield's travail and her own ... And there was the pain she had to feel in response to the reminders of Rose on that Christmas night, imprisoned in an asylum, with Laura's malformation acting as a metaphor for her daughter's enveloping madness. Then there was Tom's hope of escape - Tennessee's lifelong illusion - in pursuit of a father in love with long distances.

On one occasion, Tennessee said he could not remember his mother's reaction to the play; then on another he said that, as she sat listening to Laurette Taylor reciting her own utterances and aphorisms, "Mother began to sit up stiffer and stiffer. She looked like a horse eating briars. She was touching her throat and clasping her hands and quite unable to look at me." He thought that "what made it particularly hard for Mother to hear is that she is a tiny, delicate woman with great dignity and always managed to be extremely chic in dress, while Laurette Taylor invested the part with that blowzy, powerful quality of hers - and thank God she did, for it made the play."

That night, after the show, the cast and crew sat around waiting for the reviews to come in. Tennessee wanted to go to church, there was a midnight service down the street, but the weather was insane, freezing, a huge storm. And then - one by one, the reviews started coming in - "each more superlative than the last."

Claudia Cassidy said that the play "holds in its shadowed fragility the stamina of success" and she added "If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell." Ashton Stevens of the Herald-American called Menagerie "a lovely thing and an original thing. It has the courage of true poetry couched in colloquial prose. It is eerie and earthy in the same breath." He added that fifty years of first-nighting had provided him with few jolts so "miraculously electrical" as Laurette's portrayal and that he had not been so moved "since Eleanora Duse gave her last performance on this planet."

But still - the audience wasn't coming. The houses were small. Cassidy and Stevens began evangelists for the production.

...Claudia Cassidy ... returned for three successive performances ... Ashton Stevens virtually moved into the theatre. Everyone was faced with one of the most heartrending experiences in the theatre: helplessly watching a beautiful, highly praised production slowly expire because of the lack of public response.

This was about the time that theatre-people in New York started to make the trek out to Chicago to see what was going on.

Great playwright William Inge (who was unknown at this point, but a friend of Tennessee's) came out to see it. He describes his response:

"I sat in a half-filled theatre but I watched the most thrilling performance of the most beautiful American play I felt I had ever seen. I had the feeling at the time that what I was seeing would become an American classic...I was expecting a good play, yes, but I didn't know that I was going to encounter a work of genius ... The play itself was written so beautifully, like carved crystal and so it was a stunning experience for me and it shocked me alittle, too, to suddenly see this great work emerge from a person that I had come to know so casually."

Laurette Taylor's performance was being hailed as one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting the world had ever seen. But, as is typical with all great actors, she had huge humility and felt she could not take complete credit.

Laurette Taylor never lost an opportunity to divert the praise that was being heaped upon her to that "nice little guy," Tennessee Williams. She was always quick to remind her admirers that it was he, not she, who had written the lines that gave The Glass Menagerie its special power and beauty. And she told Tennessee, "It's a beautiful - a wonderful - a great play!"

For his part, Tennessee Williams always said that, as much as he regarded Laurette Taylor a personal friend, he never ceased to be in awe of her. "She had such a creative mind," he once remarked. "Something magical happened with Laurette. I used to stand backstage. There was a little peephole in the scenery, and I could be just about three feet from her, and when the lights hit her face, suddenly twenty years would drop off. An incandescent thing would happen in her face; it was really supernatural."

What was perhaps most extraordinary about The Glass Menagerie as a theatrical event was the meeting of these two great artists, one ending her career and the other beginning his. On that cold night of December 26, 1944, the convergence of two enormous theatre talents made theatre history. The performance itself became legendary, and the play became a classic in the literature of the American theatre.

The show continues its run in Chicago. Laurette Taylor has become the toast of the town. New York bigwigs fly in to see this new extraordinary show, and to see her performance, in particular. It is unclear at first, whether or not it will move on to New York. New York is the center of the universe. "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere..." Being a huge success in Chicago was wonderful and gratifying, for this sixty-year-old actress whom everyone had given up on for years. But she knew that ... Manhattan and the theatre audience and theatre critics in Manhattan were other animals altogether. Her anxiety grows.

As much as she was being lionized in Chicago and was enjoying it, Laurette knew the fawning for what it was: skittering leaves in the Windy City. Offstage now, she was becoming bored and edgy and more and more in need of a drink. Tom [Tennessee Williams] felt that what she actually needed was the seclusion of her own apartment and the protection of her young actress friend, Eloise. One who could understand Laurette's quicksilver disposition was Helen Hayes, then in Chicago playing in Harriet. She remembered Laurette saying over and over like an incantation, " 'I'm going to break this witch's curse.' "

Hayes said that Laurette was one of her idols and that they had been friends for a long time. "Harriet was closed on Sunday nights, and that was when I saw The Glass Menagerie. The play and Laurette were simply superb. Most nights after work, I would join her and Tennessee (they were very close) and Tony Ross, too, and we would go to their favorite bar. Laurette would order a double scotch, and when she saw my eyes widen, she reassured me that if she ordered a second drink, her deceased husband, Hartley, would come down and gently tap her on the shoulder. Being Irish, she believed that to be perfectly true."

Hayes remembered that Laurette's career had nose-dived and that hers was "a daring comeback attempt at age sixty ... One night the phone was ringing when I returned to my suite at the Ambassador. It was Laurette. 'I can't go on tomorrow,' she said in despair. 'My throat hurts, and I'm losing my voice. If I don't go on, everyone will think I'm drunk. If they say I'm drunk, I will get drunk and stay drunk till I die.' Her cry for help galvanized me." Hayes said that she always carried an electric steam kettle when she went on tour, to which she could add medicine. 'It had been helpful when I came down with bronchitis or laryngitis. I told Laurette I would come right away with the kettle ... I taxied downtown to the Sherman House. I stayed with her through most of the night, making sure she was breathing properly ... the next evening she gave a magnificent performance."

That image kills me. Helen Hayes steaming Laurette Taylor. Jesus.

The buzz around the show grew.

The word had spread to Broadway and Hollywood, and the wagers were on: Would she or would she not make it back? Everyone in the Chicago company was now, by mid-February, plainly nervous. The more Laurette was surrounded by flattery and the excitement of prominent visitors, the greater was the strain on her to keep from joining in the carouse around her. The marvelously witty and stylish actress Ina Claire was in the audience every night, and Tom wrote Audrey: "Everybody stops off here between Hollywood and New York, so our social life is terrific. We've had Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Katherine Helpburn, Terry Helburn, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic Lindsay and Crouse, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Luther Adler and God knows what all! Everybody has been favorable except Maxwell Anderson. He didn't like it."...

Katherine Hepburn's enthusiasm for The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, was such that she went straightway to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, saying that the studio should buy the play, assign George Cukor to direct, cast her as Laura and Spencer Tracy as the gentleman caller, and, above all, to capture on film Laurette's incomparable performance. She was to say later that Amanda Wingfield was Tennessee's "most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he has ever created."

But the project never came about, and so we will never know what Taylor's performance actually looked like. We can only take the words of all of the people who saw it as truth.

The play finally moves to New York. They uproot from Chicago, the glorious snowy town which had put Tennessee Williams on the map, made him a star, the town that catapulted Laurette Taylor, now a 60 year old woman, back into the limelight, after 40 years.

The pressure on the company is enormous. The show is going to be done at the Playhouse Theatre.

Laurette was well aware that both her disgrace in Alice and her comeback in Outward Bound had taken place on this same Playhouse stage. Across the street was the Cort Theatre, where her career had begun in the title role of Peg O' My Heart. She had much to look back upon, but the present confronting her was virtually unendurable. Back in her apartment, she found that her impulse was not to leave it and to seek escape in alcohol, but she also recognized this as an enemy that could bring upon her a terrible, final disagrace. In the hours before the curtain was to rise, she was under the watchful care of Eloise Sheldon, who had taken time off from her role in Harvey to be close to her.

The Glass Menagerie was scheduled to open on Saturday, March 31, Easter eve - a week after Tom's thirty-fourth birthday ... and the day before Laurette's sixty-first. Born a few weeks before Easter and reared in the symbolism of the Christian church, Tom saw this season as a special one, and he used the passage from crucifixion to resurrection as a constant theme in his work.

And so, opening night arrives. Everyone who is anyone showed up. It was a star-studded evening. Every powerhouse in town was in the audience.

That afternoon, there had been a technical run-through and the usual chaotic dress rehearsal. Audrey wrote:

I don't remember where the author was that last afternoon but I shan't ever forget sitting in an unairconditioned Playhouse Theatre. There was a frenetic veiling over everything - and everybody. The actors paced nervously before the run-through began. The light technicians tinkered with never-ending light cues and most of them came out just a little bit wrong. Having played their roles for months in Chicago meant absolutely nothing. This was the day of the New York opening. This was it. I kept remembering Liebling's remark, "You're only as good as the night they catch you."

Audrey recalled that when Laurette began her opening scene, she seemed under control "but after a few words in recognizable anguish she said, 'I'm sorry, I have to leave the stage. I'm going to be sick.' And sick she was offstage and then returned to try once more, a little whiter." The illness continued all afternoon.

The star of the show throwing up in between scenes was not the only problem during the technical run-through. "Tech"s are long and monotonous, and notoriously very tense. They are 10 hour days. At the end of the day, you do what is known as a "cue to cue". Which is self-explanatory. You run the couple of lines before a music or a light cue, the light cue is then executed, either correctly or not correctly, and then you run it again. Or you move on, if there are no mistakes. There are always mistakes. The actors have had three weeks to perfect their performances. The tech team has to do it in one day.

So The Glass Menagerie, with its musical cues, its projections on a screen in the back, its delicate light cues, was what is known as a "tech-heavy" show. The play relies upon these cues being executed in a sensitive intuitive way - it's PART of the show. It's how Tennessee wrote it. David Mamet's plays, by contrast, are pretty much: 'Lights up. Play happens. Lights out." Very different sensibility. And easier "techs".

Back to the disastrous "tech" on Easter Eve, 1946.

Paul Bowles's sensitive incidental score roared out when it should have sounded

(another quote from Audrey Wood) like circus music, away off in the distance of memory. Julie Haydon was trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but her concern for Miss Taylor was considerable. The two men, Eddie Dowling and Tony Ross, may have been scared to death, but they made a brave attempt at pretending they didn't care a damn what day it was.

The coproducer, Louis Singer, felt his way over to my side of the otherwise dark, empty auditorium where I was crouched down in my seat. Peering at me through the darkness, he said, 'Tell me - you are supposed to know a great deal about the theatre - is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you've ever seen in your life?' I nodded 'Yes.' I was too frightened to try and open my mouth.

During the rehearsal, Randy Echols had placed a bucket in the wings and, except for the two hours that Amanda was onstage, Laurette was leaning over it. Tony Ross later said, "It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance. We went home for a few hours for supper, but Eloise told me Laurette could eat nothing."

In her dressing room, Laurette had placed in front of her a large framed photograph of her [long-deceased] husband, Harley Manners.

Now we are into the final stretch. Curtain time is moments away. The description of what followed is so moving to me that tears blur my eyes as I type it out.

Eloise had [Laurette] dressed by the time of Randy's summons, "Curtain, Miss Taylor!" Tony Ross said that Mary Jean Copeland and Julie had to hlep her to her place onstage. "As the lights dimmed on Dowling at the end of his opening narration and began going up on the dining-room table we could hear Laurette's voice, 'Honey, don't push with your fingers ... And chew -- chew!' It seemed thin and uncertain. Slowly the lights came up full, and as she continued to speak, her voice gained strength. The audience didn't recognize her at first, and by the time they did she was well into her speech, and kept on going right through the applause. They soon quieted down." The bucket stayed in the wings, and "the few minutes she had between scenes, she was leaning over it retching horribly. There was nothing left inside her, poor thing, but onstage - good God! - what a performance she gave!"

In the final tableau of the play, with Tom departed, Amanda hovers protectively over a broken, deeply disturbed Laura, symbolizing what Tennessee Williams saw in his own mother: "Now that we cannot hear the mother's speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty."

At the end, the audience roared its approval. There were twenty-four curtain calls. As Laurette took her bows, tears streaked down her cheeks and she smiled somewhat tentatively while she held out the pleated frills of her worn blue party dress and curtsied. Her daughter said that she had the look of "a great ruin of a child gazing timorously upon a world she found to be infinitely pleasing."

At length, there were shouts of "Author! Author!" Eddie Dowling came down to the edge of the stage and beckoned Tom to come forward and take his place with the company. The young man who rose from the fourth row, his hair in a crew cut, his suit button missing, looked more like a junior in college than an eminent playwright. Standing in the aisle, he turned toward the stage and made a deep bow to the actors, his posterior in full view of the audience.

From this moment on, there was no turning back for Tom Williams. His prayers and those of his mother had been answered. Now he could give Edwina [his mother] financial independence and freedom from the bondage of her unhappy marriage. To his father's dismay, the little boy who could not put his blocks back in the box exactly as he had found them had become the artist who would rearrange them in a lasting architecture. And now there was no escape save into himself, and no place in the world he could go where he would not be known.

He had become Tennessee Williams.

I think my favorite part of that anecdote is that, in the moment he became a celebrity, in the moment Tom left Tom behind, to become Tennessee, his first act - the first thing he did - was bow to the ACTORS. Not to the audience who had been cheering for him, but to the company of actors who had made this success possible.

Now that is a class act.

Amanda Wingfield would be Laurette Taylor's final role. The play ran from March 31, 1945 - August 3, 1946.

Laurette Taylor died on December 7, 1946.

David Mermelstein writes:

Though she earned stardom playing the title role in "Peg o' My Heart" (1912), Taylor earned immortality much later as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" (1945). To hear those who saw her tell it, and there are still many who can, Taylor was a supreme conjurer, a mistress of the art that concealed art. Her unaffected portrayal of a struggling matron deludedly soldiering on has been described with awe as something so seemingly ordinary as to defy belief. "It could have been your mother" or "It was as if some woman off the street had stumbled into the theater." Alas, no film or recording of her performance exists. Only the legend survives -- of an old trouper giving what many consider the greatest dramatic performance of the 20th century, just before vanishing.

Martin Landau saw her in Glass Menagerie in New York and said that she "was almost like this woman had found her way into the theatre, through the stage door, and was sort of wandering around the kitchen." It was that real. (People say that about Marlon Brando's performance in Truckline Cafe - his debut. He came down the stairs in his first entrance, eating an apple, and Charles Durning, who saw the show, actually thought it was a stagehand who had wandered onstage, his behavior was so natural and real).

In the great documentary Broadway: The Golden Age (my post on it here) ranks and ranks of people talk about Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda. It was over 50 years ago now, almost 60 years, and the memory blazes bright and vivid. Nobody ever forgot it.

From a review of the documentary:

“Rise and shine! Rise and shine!”

I can hear it now, and in her voice, and so all his life could Tom Wingfield, also known as Thomas Lanier Williams, a/k/a Tennessee Williams, and so, as they talk to Rick McKay, can Gena Rowlands, Uta Hagen, Ben Gazzara, Fred Ebb, Charles Durning, and dozens of others.

Durning says it best: “I thought they’d pulled her in off the street.”

He is talking about, they are talking about, we are talking here about Laurette Taylor (1884-1946), whose performance as Amanda Wingfield. Tom’s mother, Laura’s mother, in the 1945 New York premiere of “The Glass Menagerie” at the Royale Theater on Broadway is and will always remain the American high-water mark of acting that goes beyond acting to be (that is, to seem) no acting at all.

“I saw her five times in ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” says the also great Uta Hagen whom we lost only some months ago, “and ten times in ‘Outward Bound.’ ”

“Cabaret” lyricist Fred Ebb saw “The Glass Menagerie” SEVEN times. In one instant that Ebb still carries in his gizzards, Laurette Taylor “turned around and pulled down her girdle, and I have never been so affected by a stage action in my whole life. It made me weep.”

“She could have been my mother,” says Ben Gazzara, speaking of the telephone scene in which a desperate Amanda Wingfield tries to get a female acquaintance to renew a magazine subscription at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. “It makes you laugh and cry in the same breath. How do you do that?” says Gazzara. “Only PEOPLE do that. I think we’ve all been striving to be her, one way or another.”

In 2005, Jesse Green wrote in the New York Times:

People, especially actors, who saw Laurette Taylor play Amanda Wingfield in the original production of "The Glass Menagerie" in 1945 typically say it was the best performance ever offered on the American stage. Tennessee Williams compared her radiance in the role (which he had based on his mother) to the "greatest lines of poetry" and mourned that her reputation would be limited to the "testimony and inspiration" of those who saw her. That's mostly true; Taylor appeared in only three films, all silent, and died shortly after leaving the road company of "Menagerie" in 1946. But something of what made her Amanda so memorable was captured by Eileen Darby (1916-2004), a photographer who worked Broadway from 1940 to 1964, producing some of the signal theatrical images of the period: Marlon Brando menacing a thrilled but terrified Jessica Tandy in "A Streetcar Named Desire"; Carol Channing, framed by a halo of hair and feathers, at the top of the Harmonia Gardens stairs in "Hello, Dolly!"

Some 250 of these images are featured in "Stars on Stage: Eileen Darby and Broadway's Golden Age," to be published by Bulfinch Press this month; many are included in an exhibition of Darby's work that opened Tuesday at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. None is more valuable and unexpected than this series of 12 frames of Taylor in "Menagerie" - a "key sheet" from which the show's press agent might choose a publicity shot. It records one of Amanda's efforts to earn extra money by selling renewal subscriptions to a "magazine for matrons" called The Home-maker's Companion. The action, caught at about one shot every five seconds, is so legibly written on Taylor's face that it can be matched nearly frame by frame to the Scene 3 monologue. Frame 2: "Ida Scott? ... We missed you at the D.A.R. last Monday!" Frame 4: "You're a Christian martyr, yes, that's what you are." Frame 7: "That wonderful new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper is getting off to such an exciting start." Frame 9: "Go take a look in the oven and I'll hold the wire!" Frame 11: "I think she's hung up!" And then, in Frame 12, a fleeting look of betrayal and confusion aimed at the telephone itself: a reminder that Amanda's runaway husband was a telephone man who "fell in love with long-distance."

After Taylor's own husband (her second) died in 1928, she went on a 10-year bender she later called "the longest wake in history." That's on her face, too, and one of the things Darby's photographs so memorably record is a time when Amanda could be played (indeed, could only be played) by a plain, 61-year-old warhorse whose suffering, far from being a disfigurement requiring erasure, was the essence of the gift she brought to the stage.

Laurette Taylor, before she passed away, wrote an essay about acting that is precious to me. It's not often that an actor can actually talk about he or she does, without sounding precious or like they want to be congratulated for their cleverness. But in Taylor's essay, she comes close to actually expressing magic, and yet at the same time, this lady was Irish Catholic, okay? She couldn't be airy-fairy if she tried. I know of what I speak. James Joyce said, "In Ireland Catholicism is black magic." Laurette Taylor here sounds practical, yet full of black magic. It is that very interesting mix that seems to me very particular to the Irish sensibility - the Irish artistic sensibility is what I mean. Laurette Taylor, in her long career, experienced the ups and downs, lows and highs, at a more intense frequency than most. She was not a cynical woman. She didn't have a "well, that's the way life is" bone in her body. She was not a realist. Her fantasies and dreams and hopes are part and parcel of why she turned to the bottle. Reality was too much for her. Reality is too much for a lot of geniuses. But when she was able to harness all of that light and fire and hope and loss ... nobody could touch her. How many performances have you seen where you remember the blocking 60 years later? Not too many. That was what Laurette Taylor did in Glass Menagerie. The gestures revealed the subtext. So often gestures are belabored or planned-out by the actor. "If I take off my hat on this line, this will show what I am really feeling ..." That's good stage-craft, I don't mean to knock it ... but then there are the geniuses ... who cannot HELP but reveal the subtext. The subtext is not some intellectual bit of playwriting - it is IN them, they have embodied it, they have used the rehearsal time to step into that deep pool and LIVE there, so no matter what they do: pick up the phone, pour someone a drink, fix their makeup - it reveals the subtext. My acting teacher in college always used to talk to us actors about finding "the pulse of the playwright". We must always be close to that pulse when we act. Because the job of the actor is twofold: give a good performance and also reveal the play.

Without Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda, the actual play of Glass Menagerie might not have been revealed. She WAS Tennessee Williams up there. And she didn't plan on that, or tackle it intellectually ... it was just how she worked. She didn't know any other way.

Here is Laurette Taylor's essay about the art of acting:

The Quality Most Needed - by Laurette Taylor

I have been asked to discuss, for the benefit of those who may go on the stage, the qualities which are most important as elements of success. If merely the financial or popular success of a woman star is meant, I should say that beauty is more essential than magnetism. But if by success you mean all that is implied by the magical word Art - success in the sense of Bernhardt, Duse and Ellen Terry are successes - I should say most emphatically the reverse. And I should add that imagination is more important than either.

Mere beauty is unimportant; in many cases it proves a genuine handicap. Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin.

Beauty is not all-important as an asset, even when the star is not anxious to achieve true greatness. Many of our most charming comediennes are not pretty women. Rather, they are women of great charm and personality. I cannot for the moment recall a single great actress who is a beauty. At least not in the popularly accepted idea of what constitutes beauty.

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

Beauty as I understand it does not mean simple prettiness, but stands for something allusive and subtle. The obvious seldom charms after one has had to live close to it for any length of time. Being all on the surface, there is nothing left to exhilarate, once the surface has been explored. On the other hand, the beauty which emanates from within becomes more enchanting upon close acquaintance. It is constantly revealing itself in some new guise and becomes a continual source of joy to the fortunate persons who have the privilege of meeting it frequently.

That is beauty of the imagination, and that beauty all the really great actresses have.

The case of [Sarah] Bernhardt is as good an example as one would wish. In her youth, especially, she was the very apotheosis of ugliness; still, through the power of her rich imagination that glorified her every thought and act, she held her audiences in the hollow of her hand. It is the strength and richness of her wonderful creative mind tha tmakes it possible for her to present the amazing illusion of youth which she does even today.

It isn't beauty or personality or magnetism that makes a really great actress. It is imagination, though these other qualities are useful.

You see a queer little child sitting in the middle of a mud puddle. She attracts you and holds your interest. You even smile in sympathy. Why? Simply because that child is exercising her creative imagination. She is attributing to mud pies the delicious qualities of the pies which mother makes in the kitchen. You may not stop to realize that this is what is going on in the child's mind, but unconsciously it is communicated to you. It is the quality of imagination that has held your attention ...

We create in the imagination the character we wish to express. If it is real and vital to us in imagination we will be able to express it with freedom and surety. But we must conceive it as a whole before we begin to express it.

There will be those who will disagree with me and say that magnetism presupposes imagination. This is a mistake. Many magnetic actresses are wholly lacking in imagination, their hold upon the public resting chiefly upon personality and charm and beauty. Have you ever gone to a tea party where you met some very magnetic woman who radiated charm, who not only held your attention but exhilarated you until you became impatient to see this scintillating creature on the stage, where you might realize the fullness of her wonder? And have you not felt, when your opportunity came and you saw her on the stage at last, the disappointment of realizing a wooden lady with a beautiful mask for a face, speaking faultlessly articulated lines - an actress who rose desperately to the big moments of her part, and who never for a moment let you forget that it was she, that actress, whom you saw, not the character whom she was portraying? There may have been splendid acting but you were conscious of the fact that it was acting. There was no illusion. She was conscious at the big climax that she was acting this part and that she must reach this climax. She was acting as much to herself as to you.

That is not the art of the great actress.

The imaginative actress builds a picture, using all her heart and soul and brain. She builds this picture not alone for the people out in front but for herself. She believes in it and she makes the people across the footlights believe in it. Unless she has done this she has failed. She must stimulate the imagination of the audience. An actress should not only be able to play a part; she should be able to play with it. Above all, she should not allow anything to stand between her and the thing she is expressing.

How often does an actress play a part so as to leave you with the feeling that you have so intimate a knowledge of the character that you could imagine its conduct in any position, aside from the situations involved in the action of the play? Unless this happens, you feel that after all you have seen a limited portrayal of the character and you realize that though the acting was practically flawless there was something missing. And, in nine cases out of ten, that is because the woman playing the part did not use any imagination. She was entirely bound by the tradition of the theatre. She did everything just as it would have been done by anyone else on the stage. This is fatal.

You feel untouched by the play because it was not made real to you.

The artist looks for the unusual. She watches everyone, always searching for the unusual in clothes, in manner, in gesture. The imaginative actress will even remember that the French have characteristics other than the shrug!

Think of the number of times that there have been Irish plays, of the number of times that the Irish character has been used in the working out of a plot. Yet never, to my knowledge, has an Irishman been played on the stage. (This excepts, of course, Lady Gregory's players and Guy Standing's rendition of a current Irish-American role.) Real Irishmen have never been played. The Irish can be the most melancholy people on the face of the earth, yet the traditional stage Irish have been lilting colleens and joking Paddies.

The most interesting thing to me in acting is the working out of the character itself, the finding of what which is uncommon and the small, seemingly insignificant trait which will unconsciously make an appeal to the audience and establish the human appeal. Too much importance is laid on clothes. In the main, I think that all clothes hamper unless they express the character. Personally, I detest 'straight' parts for that reason. They necessitate the clothes that make me self-conscious - or, rather "clothes conscious".

I want to get right inside the character and act from the heart as well as from the head. That is impossible unless one is free from outside interference.

I think actresses pay too much attention to the tradition of acting. That is a great mistake. It cramps creative instinct. I received a good deal of criticism for my walk in The Bird of Paradise. Some of the critics said I should be taught how to walk across the stage. Of course I paid no attention to that. My walk was the walk of the barefoot Italians who carry loads on their heads, and I had learned it from them. It was certainly not the traditional stage walk, but we are living in a time when simplicity and truth are the watchwords of the theatre. The traditional stage walk would not have fitted the character I played.

The stage has come to a period of simplicity. A few years ago the direct attitude adopted by the younger actresses of today toward their roles would have been considered ridiculous. The changes have been positive but subtle, and the actress without concentration has been unable to discern them. They are the ones who are still sparring for time in their emotional scenes, using the traditional tricks to express grief, joy, surprise, chagrin; and they wonder why they are sitting at home without engagements. They cannot comprehend that the very little basket of tricks which made them the idols of a few years ago fails utterly to get results today ...

The time has come when we may as well realize that we can no longer give a filmy portrayal of emotion and pad it out wiht stereotyped pieces of "business". The younger actresses of today express the elemental emotions as the elemental person would express them in real life. There is no such thing as a compromise in the logical development of a character in order to make a theatrical effect ...

Too few actresses follow their instinct. I think instinct is the direct connection with truth.

It is not enough to know just what you are to do yourself in the action of a piece; you must know also the exact relation you must bear to every other character in the play.

For instance, take the business of dying. You must in your imagination realize not only the fact that you are dying but the effect which your death will have on every character related to your part. You know that you are not dying and the audience knows it, but in your imagination you must really believe you are. The business of dying becomes actual to you; also, you compel the audience to believe in you by the very sincerity of your attitude.

This trait is really remarkable in Maude Adams. Recall her work in Chantecler. Without her tremendous imagination to gild her impersonation, this frail little woman would have been hopeless in the part. Yet through her marvelous richness of imagination she produced the illusion of bigness that many women better fitted physically could not have done.

One would never say that Maude Adams is beautiful, in the sense that she is pretty or has a beautiful physique; but she has charm, magnetism and imagination. These three make a beauty that transcends mere beauty.

Beauty, personality, and magnetism are not important in the equipment of a star, when compared to the creative faculty of imagination. The first three qualities are valuable adjuncts, and no one should sneeze at them. But you might get along without the slightest beauty and little or no personal magnetism if you were generously endowed with the imaginative mind.

I haven't even talked about the book! Her daughter Marguerite Courtney wrote this life of her mother, and I consider it to be essential reading. Not only does it detail Laurette Taylor's journey (with honesty, freshness, and specificity) - but it gives a snapshot of an American theatre scene that no longer exists. Courtney obviously loves her mother, but this is not the ravings of a fangirl. She tells it like it is. Wonderful book. Since my post has been all about Glass Menagerie, I will choose an excerpt from when she was playing in Peg o' My Heart and had become a star. The great stage actress Sarah Bernhardt was her idol - and this excerpt has to do with the two of them meeting.

I find Bernhardt's first-impression assessment of Laurette Taylor fascinating and quite prophetic. She saw in Taylor, who was, at that time, playing in a comedy - known for how funny she was - a "tragique actress". She saw. She saw the sadness - and basically saw Amanda Wingfield in her, although Amanda would not come into Taylor's life for another 40 years. Fascinating. Very intuitive of Bernhardt. And her prophecy that Taylor would be "the foremost actress" of America was right on - only her timeline was off by 35 years. Amazing.

Great book.

EXCERPT FROM Laurette. The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor By Her Daughter, by Marguerite Courtney

By November, 1913, Laurette had broken the record for continuous performances. Maude Adams was the previous title-holder with three hundred performances as Lady Babbie in "The Little Minister" in 1897. Laurette was growing restive. Peg was "all right for a starter" she said but she hadn't worked all these years for success to have it imprison her forever in one role. She was, as Burns Mantle put it, "threatened with the curse of popularity".

She would as soon have joined the waxwork figures of Eden Musee as let her fame rest with "Peg". Her admiration was for the innovators, like Alla Nazimova who introduced Ibsen's plays to New York. "There was courage," said Laurette, "courage of one who was willing and able to tread unknown paths." Sarah Bernhardt was her idol. Playing a young man in "L'Aiglon" at the age of fifty-five with astounding success, triumphing in a dozen roles of every variety. "I studied Bernhardt," said Lauette; "no, not studied her, I drank her in."

There was no question in Laurette's mind which course she was going to pursue in the theatre.

Laurette's first meeting with the great French tragedienne was unpropitious. Bernhardt was playing scenes from her successes at the Palace Theatre in the spring of 1913. As a publicity stunt a high-powered press agent sought three prominent Broadway actresses to walk on with her in a scene from "Phedre". Only Laurette and Marguerite Clark, then starring in "Prunella" accepted. A stenographer in the agent's office was recruited at the last minute as the third "prominent actress". The three women were pinned into ill-fitting robes over once-pink tights; wreathes of enormous pink roses were placed on their heads, and on their feet shapeless gilt sandals. Then they were taken to the great one's dressing room. The ailing Bernhardt apparently had not even bothered to inquire as to the identity of the two young actresses or what they were playing in New York, but on meeting Laurette a spark of interest lit for a moment behind the curiously slanted, catlike eyes.

"Tragic actress?" she asked in English.

"No, madame. Comedienne."

Bernhardt looked puzzled, muttered something in French, then swept her hand across Laurette's eyes. "Non - non!" she said emphatically. "Tragique actress!"

The brief appearance of Phedre's handmaidens was as near farcical as the costumes, but Laurette remembered only the matchless thrill of "walking on" with Bernhardt, the weight of those "divine bones" leaning on her arm as the procession slowly made its way to Phedre's throne.

A week later Bernhardt sent word to the Cort that she would like to see Laurette's play. Because of Madame's daily matinees a special performance of "Peg" was arranged for eleven o'clock in the morning. A souvenir program was printed in French, an armchair placed in the aisle. At the sight of the chair Bernhardt had a tantrum, insisting on sitting in an aisle seat; there, bright-eyed and eager as a child she waited for the curtain to rise. Thus, for the immortal Sarah, Laurette played her immortal "Peg".

At Bernhardt's specific request not a line of publicity was given to the event. Over her signature had been issued a bewildering number of statements on everything from the health value of lemon juice before breakfast to the plight of the immigrant. Witnessing Laurette's Peg the French actress seemed to touch bedrock in publicity quicksands. She wrote in an article syndicated all over the country:

One young artist in New York has not allowed herself to be blinded. She has worked hard and is still working, although she is already a very agreeable comedienne, possessing humor, emotion, and a rare thing for her age - power. I speak of Laurette Taylor who will become within five years the foremost actress of this country ... All aspirants for the stage should take this young actress as their model.

Three years later, on another farewell tour, Bernhardt again asked to see Laurette play. This time she was grievously ill and, because of the ailing leg, forced to use a wheel chair. To permit her to retire backstage between acts, the two sets of "The Harp of Life" were moved from the Globe to the Empire where she was playing. The performance was given at one p.m. This time there was no embargo on press or public and the audience came by special invitation. It was one of the most brilliant professional assemblages in New York theatre history.

Due to difficulties in getting Madame's wheel chair in and out of the box, prolonged retirements backstage to sip hot milk and rest, the second act was not finished until almost six o'clock. Bernhardt stayed in her place until the audience had left, then asked the company to play the last act. But there wasn't time. She thanked the cast, patted Laurette's cheek, and was wheeled off to prepare for her evening performance.

Asked what it was like to play for Bernhardt, Laurette said, "It was like playing to royalty and a little child."

Bernhardt was Laurette's lodestar, the great inspiration of her acting life. "But I could never be a Bernhardt," she once said. "There just isn't enough of me."

The Books: "Elizabeth" (J. Randy Taraborrelli)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Elizabeth, by J. Randy Taraborrelli

When I was a kid, I saw National Velvet multiple times - probably at my cousins' house. That's where I remember watching most of the old movies that I remember from childhood. All the Shirley Temple movies, Frankenstein, the Buster Keaton movies, The Secret Garden (starring my main man Dean Stockwell), and other classics. Channel 56 out of Boston always ran such movies in the afternoon (at least that's how I remember it), and so we'd be hanging out in their den downstairs, and watch these old movies. I guess when you only have a couple of channels to choose from - and not a constant bombardment of kids' shows on one network devoted to children - you watch whatever happens to be on. So that's how I was exposed to those movies. I'm not sure if TCM had been around at the time, we would have CHOSEN that channel, as kids. Not when there were so many more contemporary choices. But as it was, there were afternoon movies, in black and white, and we would watch those. You know how some of the things you saw as a kid stay in brain with far more vividness than a show you watched last week? I remember Secret Garden perfectly - it's almost like the whole movie has stayed encapsulated in my brain, preserved. Same with National Velvet. I have always loved the 'sports movie' formula - even as a little kid. The underdog, the training montage, the triumph over adversity ... and National Velvet just works on all of those levels. The wonderful and haunting Black Stallion came out when I was 10 or 11 years old, and I remember my mother driving me and my brother to see it in East Greenwich. Could that be real? I don't know - I just remember it. We did not go see the movie in our hometown. We had to TRAVEL. And of course you know that for Rhode Islanders, any drive longer than 5 minutes requires you to pack a lunch and some reading material for the long long drive. It was a big deal. I loved Black Stallion (I still do!) and I remember my mom telling me that the old guy playing the trainer was also the young guy in National Velvet. Obviously, Rooney was chosen, in part, as a tribute to that old horse-race movie ... and I remember being gobsmacked that that was the same person!

When I saw National Velvet, I had no sense of who Elizabeth Taylor was in the grand scheme of things. I didn't think that way, as a child. I just enjoyed the movie, and related to her character. It would be years before I saw Place in the Sun and Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. My first encounters with most of those old movie stars was through their WORK, not their reputation. Katharine Hepburn in Little Women. I had no idea who she was, or how important she was - but Little Women was a movie I loved so much that I wanted it to be played on a constant loop every weekend so that I could keep experiencing it.

Elizabeth Taylor was a child star. She had a dominating mother, and Elizabeth's career basically supported the whole family. She was a workhorse. Similar to what Dean Stockwell experienced (they were in the same studio school), except that when Stockwell said to his mother, at age 16, "I don't want to do this anymore, I don't want to renew my contract," she was like, "Sure, no problem, do what you have to do." Taylor was not granted such leniency, although she may have never said what she wanted in no uncertain terms like Stockwell did. Taylor did what she was told to do (and her extended adolescence probably has a lot to do with how dominated she was as a kid, how hard she had to work). She was a precocious beauty - even her baby pictures look like little glam shots, and she's just sitting there in her diapers and a white dress. But the face. The face is startling. Lots of cute babies don't grow up to be gorgeous adults. But Taylor wasn't just "cute". She was startlingly beautiful, black hair, white skin, violet eyes, and eyelashes a foot long.

Taraborrelli has written a lot of celebrity biographies. He is not a good writer. But he writes bestsellers. With someone like Taylor, her personal life necessarily takes the focus, because ... seriously ... there is so much to focus on there! I'm interested in it because it makes her interesting - but as always I'm more interested in the acting side of things. Who was she as an actress? Yes, she obviously had great beauty at a very early age (always a good thing if you're in show business), and she also had a natural gift. If you see her in National Velvet now, her acting would fit in into any children's movie today. It's fresh, spontaneous, endearing, and kids relate to her. She's wonderful. It's a natural ability - much like Stockwell's. You see the movies Stockwell made as a little kid - even his debut (Anchors Aweigh) - and you feel like you are looking at a real child - not a precocious actor-child who has spent his entire free time in tap class and elocution workshops. In general, I don't like child actors - but when one comes along that seems fresh and real, it can be remarkable. Taylor had that.

Taraborrelli skips over the acting stuff and everything - EVERYTHING - has to do with her personal life. I yawned my way through the book, eager for any anecdote that showed her as an actress, someone who knew what she was doing, or who struggled - whatever the case may be ... And there are some anecdotes like that, but they are few and far between. The focus is on her many marriages, basically - and by the end of the book, the focus switches to her great and tireless charity work. Books like this sell like hotcakes, but they aren't really my cup of tea. I like things a bit more serious. I suppose it's hard, sometimes, to be serious about Elizabeth Taylor - although I believe she will get her due someday. She played some great roles. But that's neither here nor there. Like I said earlier, Elizabeth Taylor's personal life was always more notorious than her acting ... you just can't help but focus on it. It took center stage. She was a tabloid queen. She married multiple times. She was widowed as a young woman. She stole Debbie Reynolds' husband Eddie Fisher right out from under Reynolds' nose. (Taylor and Reynolds are friends now. They did a TV movie together in 2001 called These Old Broads, and Reynolds has said that all they would do, between takes, was sit and dish on Eddie Fisher, laughing about him. Ouch!! Old broads indeed.) Taylor married and divorced Richard Burton twice. He was the love of her life. She was condemned personally by the Vatican for her shenanigans during filming Cleopatra in Rome. Her life was tabloid fodder. She nearly died during the filming of Cleopatra and only an emergency tracheotomy saved her life. She had children. She was best friends and soulmates with Montgomery Clift, and it broke her heart to see what happened to him over his life. They had nicknames for each other, and she always felt that if Clift hadn't been gay, the two of them would have married. There was an affinity there.

Kevin McCarthy describes (and it's horrifying) the car accident that crushed Montgomery Clift's face. He was driving away from a party at Elizabeth's house and smashed into a tree. Elizabeth Taylor saved his life:

Suddenly I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw that Monty's car was coming much too close to my car. I got the idea he was going to play one of his practical jokes - he was going to give my car a little nudge. He never did bump my car, but I had the feeling he might, so I put my foot on the gas and went a little faster. Monty's car seemed to be almost on top of me. I wondered if he was having a blackout. I got frightened and spurted ahead so he wouldn't bump me. We both made the first turn but the next one was treacherous. We were careening now, swerving, and screeching through the darkness. Behind me I saw Monty's carlights weave from one side of the road to the other and then I heard a terrible crash. A cloud of dust appeared in my rearview mirror. I stopped and ran back. Monty's car was crumpled like an accordion against a telephone pole. The motor was running like hell. I could smell gas. I managed to reach in the window and turn off the ignition, but it was so dark I couldn't see inside the car. I didn't know where Monty was. He seemed to have disappeared.

I ran and drove my car back and shone the headlights into Monty's car. Then I saw him curled under the dahsboard. He'd been pushed there by the force of the crash. His face was torn away - a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.

I drove back to Elizabeth's shaking like a leaf and pounded on the door. "There's been a terrible accident!" I yelled, "I don't know whether Monty's dead or alive - get an ambulance quick!" Mike Wilding and I both tried to keep Elizabeth from coming down to the car with us but she fought us off like a tiger. "No! No! I'm going to Monty!" she screamed, and she raced down the hill.

She was like Mother Courage. Monty's car was so crushed you couldn't open the front door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Then she crouched down and cradled Monty's head in her lap. He gave a little moan. Then he started to choke. He pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. I'll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled those teeth. Otherwise he would have choked to death.

None of her behavior there surprises me. Yes, she was gorgeous, pampered, spoiled, and willful. But she was also loyal, earthy, fearless, with a huge heart. It's not either/or.

And now she is the grande dame of charity work, beloved by many - in fact, just recently (I can't remember where) I read a story about Taylor - who rarely leaves her home now. She is wheelchair bound. But on occasion, she will have her driver take her down to a local gay bar near her house - where they love her (of course) - and her pictures are on the wall, and she knows everyone - and she'll wheel her way into the joint and have an apple martini, as the gay boys hover around her, adoring her. I love that image.

She was one of those people who burned really bright while it was "her turn", and never really flamed out - but the years showed on her in a more unforgiving way than on other actresses. Her weight was ridiculed, her hair was ridiculed, she was lampooned for getting fat ... the jokes about her over the years have been very cruel. I suppose that's the price you pay for being such a giant icon, and having your image emblazoned in our heads for all time - as a young slender woman, more beautiful than it is possible to even imagine.

She does seem to have a very good sense of humor about herself. Member when she was on General Hospital for a bit? I remember watching one of those Bloopers shows, and there was a series of clips from General Hospital, of her big serious melodramatic entrance - and how she could barely get through it without busting up laughing. She'd make it halfway across the room and then start howling (have you heard her really laugh? It's voracious, loud, spontaneous ... it's a great laugh. The laugh of a woman who loves sex - a generous laugh). Or she'd make it through 1 or 2 lines and you could FEEL her losing it, struggling to sit on the laughter - and at one point, she broke out of character and said, "I'm sorry, can we start again? I never knew how to act" and the whole place just erupted into laughter. I like her for not taking herself too seriously.

She campaigned hard to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and one of the great alternative-history fantasies I have is imagining Richard Burton as Henry Higgins and Liz as Eliza Doolittle. It certainly wouldn't have been the play that Shaw wrote originally - but I think it would have been amazing to watch!! Taylor felt intimidated by Burton's smarts. She always thought he wanted her to be better-read, more well-versed in the cultural touchstones that he knew so well. I mean, the man had entire Shakespeare plays in his head at all times. I just think that dynamic would have been so interesting in the Henry Higgins/Liza Doolittle roles.

Taraborrelli obviously loves Elizabeth Taylor, but I think he loves her too much. He protects her, in his writing, and his fanboy tendencies come out in his asides. Obviously if you are going to write a biography of someone, you have to have some interest in that person - you have to want to spend time with that person, and want to illuminate their character and their journey for the masses. But it's a fine line. The best biographies do not "weigh in" on their subject. Good or bad. Peter Manso's giant tome on Brando is basically a smear book, and Taraborrelli's book on Taylor is pro-Taylor propaganda. These books obviously sell, they just don't interest ME all that much.

Louis Bayard reviewed the book for The Washington Post and he writes:

The only way a movie-star bio can attain lasting value (and virtually none of them do) is to document the actor's intersection with some lasting work of art, as Lee Server accomplished in his take on Robert Mitchum. For Taraborrelli, self-appointed chronicler of the Kennedy women and Princess Grace, the movies are just coffee breaks in the full-time disinterring of ancient gossip: Nicky-Mikey-Eddie-Dickie. We learn that Taylor's most lauded performance, in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," was fueled by alcoholic marital rages with Richard Burton, but we learn next to nothing about her best work, which, in my opinion, came 15 years earlier, before Burton ever infected her with the desire to be an ektress.

Check her out sometime as the wealthy love interest in "A Place in the Sun," George Stevens's film transcription of the Theodore Dreiser classic An American Tragedy. You'll find a pitch-perfect study of an entitled young woman undone by desire. Her love scenes with Montgomery Clift are almost painful in their eroticism, and a biographer who was curious about such things might wonder why Taylor could generate more on-screen heat with a gay man than she ever did with Burton. There's something to be said here about artifice yielding truth and truth yielding artifice and the drowning of a small talent in the shoals of high culture and the pitfalls of having double eyelashes. There is, yes, a book to be written about Elizabeth Taylor and the cultural phenomenon she represented. It's just not the book that J. Randy Taraborrelli has written. Or had any intention of writing.

I love that. I do believe that what he says is true. There is a book to be written about Taylor. Not just the tabloid stuff, because, come on, that's been done to death. We all know all of that. But what she represented ... and what her journey says about the Hollywood studio system, and also the roles that she got ... Taraborrelli only focuses on the biography. He knows no other way. When he writes about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where Taylor gives a fearless insane performance as Martha, he is out of his element - all he can talk about is the backstage stuff - that's all that interests him and when it comes time to talk about the movie itself, he falls back on, "Film critics generally agree it is her best work ..." He can't just say it himself, he doesn't have the confidence (or the interest). Whatever, it might be her best work, but let's get back to the divorces and marriages and divorces!!

I did find a really nice anecdote in the book - something I had not been aware of (staged readings she did in New York with Burton) ... and so that's the excerpt I chose.

EXCERPT FROM Elizabeth, by J. Randy Taraborrelli

In the summer of 1964, Elizabeth Taylor found herself working in a very different venue for her, the theater. Philip Barton had asked if she would participate with Richard in a literary evening at the Lunt-Fontaine to raise funds for his American Musical and Dramatic Academy of New York. The program, titled "World Enough and Time", involved the Burtons reading excerpts from the works of D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edwin Markham, and, oddly but maybe also appropriately, John Lennon of the Beatles. Elizabeth rehearsed for two weeks; she had a tough time with it. Some of the Burtons' friends felt that there was an ulterior motive to Elizabeth's work on the stage at this time. She was always very aware of the kind of education she had at MGM, and it never bothered her much ... until she was with Burton. She then found herself in some ways feeling intellectually inferior. "I never mind being wrong with Richard because I learn from him and he never treats me like an idiot," she would later write. "He makes me feel an intellectual equal of his, which, of course, I am not."

"He was Higgins and she was Eliza," said Richard's good friend Joe Sirola. "In other words, here's a woman not terribly educated, not a great actress, didn't know the classics, any of that. And here she meets a guy, this theater star, who understood all the classics, could recite them back to you, this great actor. I always sensed that she didn't feel she was his match, intellectually. And the poetry and all of that was sort of trying to compensate, at least that's how I viewed it at the time."

It's also true that Elizabeth was often afraid of boring Richard. She and a tutor of the children's were walking on a beach in Puerto Vallarta once, and she was talking about her marriage to Richard and how much she loved him. She said, "But I'm afraid I'm going to lose him. I think I bore him. I don't think I'm smart enough." It was a stunning admission.

"It had to be tough on her," says Sirola. "I mean, to the world she was this great star. Privately, she had these insecurities about her value to Richard."

On the big night, she walked onto the stage swathed in pleated white silk, with emerald-and-diamond earrings and a delicate spray of white buds in her hair. It was a star-studded audience that included Carol Channing, Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and Beatrice Lilly. Elizabeth had barely started when she flubbed her lines. "Oh, I'll have to begin again," she said apologetically. "I screwed it all up." Richard quipped, "This is funnier than Hamlet" - which probably did little to assist her. Still, from then on, the audience was with Elizabeth as the underdog in the production. Her reviews the next day were generally positive.

Also at this time, Elizabeth was writing the second of her four books, Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal Memoir. (The first had been the children's book Nibbles and Me). "Even our fights are fun - nothing placidly bovine about us," she wrote of Burton. "Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It's beautiful to watch. Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off - sparks fly, walls shake, floors vibrate." When writing about the possibility of his cheating on her, she noted, "I would love him enough to love the hurt he might give me and be patient. I have learned that pride is very bad, the kind of pride that makes you say, 'I won't tolerate that.'"

At the end of the year, the Burtons filmed another movie together, their third, The Sandpiper. Elizabeth hadn't been in front of a camera in two years, having decided to devote her time to her husband and his career. Also, she would later explain, she could not obtain insurance from a studio due to her many health issues. "I didn't think I could get a job," she said, "so I grabbed The Sandpiper and let them pay their million dollars." She also noted that she never thought the film would be "an artistic masterpiece". Work of art or not, once Elizabeth was back in front of the cameras on a soundstage, she couldn't have been happier. The movie began in Big Sur, and ended in Paris. All of Elizabeth's children were there with her, including Maria (who had undergone a remarkable rehabilitation by this time, and who also had her own governess and nurse).

After a day of filming, Elizabeth and Richard would customarily have drinks together at the bar of the Lancaster Hotel. One evening, as the Burtons relaxed, three people rushed into the bar, two women and a man. The man began taking photographs and, before Elizabeth and Richard knew what was happening, rushed off. One of the women then began speaking in German, her words tumbling out quickly as she frantically motioned toward her friend. Suddenly, it hit Elizabeth: The woman's friend was Maria's birth mother. "Is this [she said the woman's name]?" Elizabeth asked. "Yes, this is her," admitted her friend. "I'm going to interpret for her." Elizabeth and Richard then realized that Maria's mother had been brought to them for a tabloid photo opportunity. Taylor was enraged. "You're no friend of hers," she screamed at the woman. "You're a journalist. And I'm going to kill you if you don't get out of here, now!"

"No. I am a friend of hers," the woman protested.

"Leave!" Richard bellowed. The woman ran from the room, leaving Maria's distressed natural mother with the Burtons. Elizabeth took her by the arm and urged her to sit.

Luckily, the Burtons' trusted attorney and good friend, Aaron Frosch - who spoke German - happened to be coming by the hotel to meet with them. Slowly the story unfolded. Apparently the editor of a gossip magazine in France had contacted Maria's natural mother in Germany and told her that the Taylors wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with her. She believed them, and that's why she was in France. Actually, it was all a ruse so that the publication could obtain photographs of Maria's poor natural mother in the same room with her rich adopted mother for a sensational story.

"Elizabeth felt awful about it," said Marie Bentkover. "She realized that these people's lives were forever changed by having an association with her. Elizabeth and Richard bought the woman a plane ticket so that she could return to Germany."

The next morning found the Burtons back on the set of The Sandpiper. Elizabeth had chosen Vincente Minnelli, who had guided her when she was still in her teens in two of her most successful early films, Father of the Bride and Father's Little Dividend, to direct the film, in which Elizabeth portrays an artist who has a complicated affair with an Episcopal minister, played by Richard. Elizabeth had wanted Sammy Davis Jr., whom she had recently befriended in New York, to essay the role of the man she leaves for the Burton character, but producer Martin Ransohoff felt the idea was "too ahead of its time, though it surely would have caused quite a sensation having Taylor and Davis involved in a romance on the screen in the 1960s." Future action star Charles Bronson ended up with the role.

When The Sandpiper was finally released in 1965, fans stormed Radio City Music Hall in New York for the premiere, to see Elizabeth on the screen for the first time in two years. The movie's theme, "The Shadow of Your Smile" became a hit record for Tony Bennett and remains a popular standard even today. The film was a box-office smash, bringing in more than $10 million. If nothing else, it validated the commerciality of its stars because, in truth, the movie suffered from a weak story that an even weaker script could not overcome. Despite brisk ticket sales, the Burtons knew they had made what Elizabeth referred to as "a real turkey". When she received one lone good review for her performance in it, she quipped, "How dare that writer! I'm suing for libel."

The Books: "Elizabeth" (J. Randy Taraborrelli)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Elizabeth, by J. Randy Taraborrelli

When I was a kid, I saw National Velvet multiple times - probably at my cousins' house. That's where I remember watching most of the old movies that I remember from childhood. All the Shirley Temple movies, Frankenstein, the Buster Keaton movies, The Secret Garden (starring my main man Dean Stockwell), and other classics. Channel 56 out of Boston always ran such movies in the afternoon (at least that's how I remember it), and so we'd be hanging out in their den downstairs, and watch these old movies. I guess when you only have a couple of channels to choose from - and not a constant bombardment of kids' shows on one network devoted to children - you watch whatever happens to be on. So that's how I was exposed to those movies. I'm not sure if TCM had been around at the time, we would have CHOSEN that channel, as kids. Not when there were so many more contemporary choices. But as it was, there were afternoon movies, in black and white, and we would watch those. You know how some of the things you saw as a kid stay in brain with far more vividness than a show you watched last week? I remember Secret Garden perfectly - it's almost like the whole movie has stayed encapsulated in my brain, preserved. Same with National Velvet. I have always loved the 'sports movie' formula - even as a little kid. The underdog, the training montage, the triumph over adversity ... and National Velvet just works on all of those levels. The wonderful and haunting Black Stallion came out when I was 10 or 11 years old, and I remember my mother driving me and my brother to see it in East Greenwich. Could that be real? I don't know - I just remember it. We did not go see the movie in our hometown. We had to TRAVEL. And of course you know that for Rhode Islanders, any drive longer than 5 minutes requires you to pack a lunch and some reading material for the long long drive. It was a big deal. I loved Black Stallion (I still do!) and I remember my mom telling me that the old guy playing the trainer was also the young guy in National Velvet. Obviously, Rooney was chosen, in part, as a tribute to that old horse-race movie ... and I remember being gobsmacked that that was the same person!

When I saw National Velvet, I had no sense of who Elizabeth Taylor was in the grand scheme of things. I didn't think that way, as a child. I just enjoyed the movie, and related to her character. It would be years before I saw Place in the Sun and Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. My first encounters with most of those old movie stars was through their WORK, not their reputation. Katharine Hepburn in Little Women. I had no idea who she was, or how important she was - but Little Women was a movie I loved so much that I wanted it to be played on a constant loop every weekend so that I could keep experiencing it.

Elizabeth Taylor was a child star. She had a dominating mother, and Elizabeth's career basically supported the whole family. She was a workhorse. Similar to what Dean Stockwell experienced (they were in the same studio school), except that when Stockwell said to his mother, at age 16, "I don't want to do this anymore, I don't want to renew my contract," she was like, "Sure, no problem, do what you have to do." Taylor was not granted such leniency, although she may have never said what she wanted in no uncertain terms like Stockwell did. Taylor did what she was told to do (and her extended adolescence probably has a lot to do with how dominated she was as a kid, how hard she had to work). She was a precocious beauty - even her baby pictures look like little glam shots, and she's just sitting there in her diapers and a white dress. But the face. The face is startling. Lots of cute babies don't grow up to be gorgeous adults. But Taylor wasn't just "cute". She was startlingly beautiful, black hair, white skin, violet eyes, and eyelashes a foot long.

Taraborrelli has written a lot of celebrity biographies. He is not a good writer. But he writes bestsellers. With someone like Taylor, her personal life necessarily takes the focus, because ... seriously ... there is so much to focus on there! I'm interested in it because it makes her interesting - but as always I'm more interested in the acting side of things. Who was she as an actress? Yes, she obviously had great beauty at a very early age (always a good thing if you're in show business), and she also had a natural gift. If you see her in National Velvet now, her acting would fit in into any children's movie today. It's fresh, spontaneous, endearing, and kids relate to her. She's wonderful. It's a natural ability - much like Stockwell's. You see the movies Stockwell made as a little kid - even his debut (Anchors Aweigh) - and you feel like you are looking at a real child - not a precocious actor-child who has spent his entire free time in tap class and elocution workshops. In general, I don't like child actors - but when one comes along that seems fresh and real, it can be remarkable. Taylor had that.

Taraborrelli skips over the acting stuff and everything - EVERYTHING - has to do with her personal life. I yawned my way through the book, eager for any anecdote that showed her as an actress, someone who knew what she was doing, or who struggled - whatever the case may be ... And there are some anecdotes like that, but they are few and far between. The focus is on her many marriages, basically - and by the end of the book, the focus switches to her great and tireless charity work. Books like this sell like hotcakes, but they aren't really my cup of tea. I like things a bit more serious. I suppose it's hard, sometimes, to be serious about Elizabeth Taylor - although I believe she will get her due someday. She played some great roles. But that's neither here nor there. Like I said earlier, Elizabeth Taylor's personal life was always more notorious than her acting ... you just can't help but focus on it. It took center stage. She was a tabloid queen. She married multiple times. She was widowed as a young woman. She stole Debbie Reynolds' husband Eddie Fisher right out from under Reynolds' nose. (Taylor and Reynolds are friends now. They did a TV movie together in 2001 called These Old Broads, and Reynolds has said that all they would do, between takes, was sit and dish on Eddie Fisher, laughing about him. Ouch!! Old broads indeed.) Taylor married and divorced Richard Burton twice. He was the love of her life. She was condemned personally by the Vatican for her shenanigans during filming Cleopatra in Rome. Her life was tabloid fodder. She nearly died during the filming of Cleopatra and only an emergency tracheotomy saved her life. She had children. She was best friends and soulmates with Montgomery Clift, and it broke her heart to see what happened to him over his life. They had nicknames for each other, and she always felt that if Clift hadn't been gay, the two of them would have married. There was an affinity there.

Kevin McCarthy describes (and it's horrifying) the car accident that crushed Montgomery Clift's face. He was driving away from a party at Elizabeth's house and smashed into a tree. Elizabeth Taylor saved his life:

Suddenly I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw that Monty's car was coming much too close to my car. I got the idea he was going to play one of his practical jokes - he was going to give my car a little nudge. He never did bump my car, but I had the feeling he might, so I put my foot on the gas and went a little faster. Monty's car seemed to be almost on top of me. I wondered if he was having a blackout. I got frightened and spurted ahead so he wouldn't bump me. We both made the first turn but the next one was treacherous. We were careening now, swerving, and screeching through the darkness. Behind me I saw Monty's carlights weave from one side of the road to the other and then I heard a terrible crash. A cloud of dust appeared in my rearview mirror. I stopped and ran back. Monty's car was crumpled like an accordion against a telephone pole. The motor was running like hell. I could smell gas. I managed to reach in the window and turn off the ignition, but it was so dark I couldn't see inside the car. I didn't know where Monty was. He seemed to have disappeared.

I ran and drove my car back and shone the headlights into Monty's car. Then I saw him curled under the dahsboard. He'd been pushed there by the force of the crash. His face was torn away - a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.

I drove back to Elizabeth's shaking like a leaf and pounded on the door. "There's been a terrible accident!" I yelled, "I don't know whether Monty's dead or alive - get an ambulance quick!" Mike Wilding and I both tried to keep Elizabeth from coming down to the car with us but she fought us off like a tiger. "No! No! I'm going to Monty!" she screamed, and she raced down the hill.

She was like Mother Courage. Monty's car was so crushed you couldn't open the front door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Then she crouched down and cradled Monty's head in her lap. He gave a little moan. Then he started to choke. He pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. I'll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled those teeth. Otherwise he would have choked to death.

None of her behavior there surprises me. Yes, she was gorgeous, pampered, spoiled, and willful. But she was also loyal, earthy, fearless, with a huge heart. It's not either/or.

And now she is the grande dame of charity work, beloved by many - in fact, just recently (I can't remember where) I read a story about Taylor - who rarely leaves her home now. She is wheelchair bound. But on occasion, she will have her driver take her down to a local gay bar near her house - where they love her (of course) - and her pictures are on the wall, and she knows everyone - and she'll wheel her way into the joint and have an apple martini, as the gay boys hover around her, adoring her. I love that image.

She was one of those people who burned really bright while it was "her turn", and never really flamed out - but the years showed on her in a more unforgiving way than on other actresses. Her weight was ridiculed, her hair was ridiculed, she was lampooned for getting fat ... the jokes about her over the years have been very cruel. I suppose that's the price you pay for being such a giant icon, and having your image emblazoned in our heads for all time - as a young slender woman, more beautiful than it is possible to even imagine.

She does seem to have a very good sense of humor about herself. Member when she was on General Hospital for a bit? I remember watching one of those Bloopers shows, and there was a series of clips from General Hospital, of her big serious melodramatic entrance - and how she could barely get through it without busting up laughing. She'd make it halfway across the room and then start howling (have you heard her really laugh? It's voracious, loud, spontaneous ... it's a great laugh. The laugh of a woman who loves sex - a generous laugh). Or she'd make it through 1 or 2 lines and you could FEEL her losing it, struggling to sit on the laughter - and at one point, she broke out of character and said, "I'm sorry, can we start again? I never knew how to act" and the whole place just erupted into laughter. I like her for not taking herself too seriously.

She campaigned hard to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and one of the great alternative-history fantasies I have is imagining Richard Burton as Henry Higgins and Liz as Eliza Doolittle. It certainly wouldn't have been the play that Shaw wrote originally - but I think it would have been amazing to watch!! Taylor felt intimidated by Burton's smarts. She always thought he wanted her to be better-read, more well-versed in the cultural touchstones that he knew so well. I mean, the man had entire Shakespeare plays in his head at all times. I just think that dynamic would have been so interesting in the Henry Higgins/Liza Doolittle roles.

Taraborrelli obviously loves Elizabeth Taylor, but I think he loves her too much. He protects her, in his writing, and his fanboy tendencies come out in his asides. Obviously if you are going to write a biography of someone, you have to have some interest in that person - you have to want to spend time with that person, and want to illuminate their character and their journey for the masses. But it's a fine line. The best biographies do not "weigh in" on their subject. Good or bad. Peter Manso's giant tome on Brando is basically a smear book, and Taraborrelli's book on Taylor is pro-Taylor propaganda. These books obviously sell, they just don't interest ME all that much.

Louis Bayard reviewed the book for The Washington Post and he writes:

The only way a movie-star bio can attain lasting value (and virtually none of them do) is to document the actor's intersection with some lasting work of art, as Lee Server accomplished in his take on Robert Mitchum. For Taraborrelli, self-appointed chronicler of the Kennedy women and Princess Grace, the movies are just coffee breaks in the full-time disinterring of ancient gossip: Nicky-Mikey-Eddie-Dickie. We learn that Taylor's most lauded performance, in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," was fueled by alcoholic marital rages with Richard Burton, but we learn next to nothing about her best work, which, in my opinion, came 15 years earlier, before Burton ever infected her with the desire to be an ektress.

Check her out sometime as the wealthy love interest in "A Place in the Sun," George Stevens's film transcription of the Theodore Dreiser classic An American Tragedy. You'll find a pitch-perfect study of an entitled young woman undone by desire. Her love scenes with Montgomery Clift are almost painful in their eroticism, and a biographer who was curious about such things might wonder why Taylor could generate more on-screen heat with a gay man than she ever did with Burton. There's something to be said here about artifice yielding truth and truth yielding artifice and the drowning of a small talent in the shoals of high culture and the pitfalls of having double eyelashes. There is, yes, a book to be written about Elizabeth Taylor and the cultural phenomenon she represented. It's just not the book that J. Randy Taraborrelli has written. Or had any intention of writing.

I love that. I do believe that what he says is true. There is a book to be written about Taylor. Not just the tabloid stuff, because, come on, that's been done to death. We all know all of that. But what she represented ... and what her journey says about the Hollywood studio system, and also the roles that she got ... Taraborrelli only focuses on the biography. He knows no other way. When he writes about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where Taylor gives a fearless insane performance as Martha, he is out of his element - all he can talk about is the backstage stuff - that's all that interests him and when it comes time to talk about the movie itself, he falls back on, "Film critics generally agree it is her best work ..." He can't just say it himself, he doesn't have the confidence (or the interest). Whatever, it might be her best work, but let's get back to the divorces and marriages and divorces!!

I did find a really nice anecdote in the book - something I had not been aware of (staged readings she did in New York with Burton) ... and so that's the excerpt I chose.

EXCERPT FROM Elizabeth, by J. Randy Taraborrelli

In the summer of 1964, Elizabeth Taylor found herself working in a very different venue for her, the theater. Philip Barton had asked if she would participate with Richard in a literary evening at the Lunt-Fontaine to raise funds for his American Musical and Dramatic Academy of New York. The program, titled "World Enough and Time", involved the Burtons reading excerpts from the works of D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edwin Markham, and, oddly but maybe also appropriately, John Lennon of the Beatles. Elizabeth rehearsed for two weeks; she had a tough time with it. Some of the Burtons' friends felt that there was an ulterior motive to Elizabeth's work on the stage at this time. She was always very aware of the kind of education she had at MGM, and it never bothered her much ... until she was with Burton. She then found herself in some ways feeling intellectually inferior. "I never mind being wrong with Richard because I learn from him and he never treats me like an idiot," she would later write. "He makes me feel an intellectual equal of his, which, of course, I am not."

"He was Higgins and she was Eliza," said Richard's good friend Joe Sirola. "In other words, here's a woman not terribly educated, not a great actress, didn't know the classics, any of that. And here she meets a guy, this theater star, who understood all the classics, could recite them back to you, this great actor. I always sensed that she didn't feel she was his match, intellectually. And the poetry and all of that was sort of trying to compensate, at least that's how I viewed it at the time."

It's also true that Elizabeth was often afraid of boring Richard. She and a tutor of the children's were walking on a beach in Puerto Vallarta once, and she was talking about her marriage to Richard and how much she loved him. She said, "But I'm afraid I'm going to lose him. I think I bore him. I don't think I'm smart enough." It was a stunning admission.

"It had to be tough on her," says Sirola. "I mean, to the world she was this great star. Privately, she had these insecurities about her value to Richard."

On the big night, she walked onto the stage swathed in pleated white silk, with emerald-and-diamond earrings and a delicate spray of white buds in her hair. It was a star-studded audience that included Carol Channing, Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and Beatrice Lilly. Elizabeth had barely started when she flubbed her lines. "Oh, I'll have to begin again," she said apologetically. "I screwed it all up." Richard quipped, "This is funnier than Hamlet" - which probably did little to assist her. Still, from then on, the audience was with Elizabeth as the underdog in the production. Her reviews the next day were generally positive.

Also at this time, Elizabeth was writing the second of her four books, Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal Memoir. (The first had been the children's book Nibbles and Me). "Even our fights are fun - nothing placidly bovine about us," she wrote of Burton. "Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It's beautiful to watch. Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off - sparks fly, walls shake, floors vibrate." When writing about the possibility of his cheating on her, she noted, "I would love him enough to love the hurt he might give me and be patient. I have learned that pride is very bad, the kind of pride that makes you say, 'I won't tolerate that.'"

At the end of the year, the Burtons filmed another movie together, their third, The Sandpiper. Elizabeth hadn't been in front of a camera in two years, having decided to devote her time to her husband and his career. Also, she would later explain, she could not obtain insurance from a studio due to her many health issues. "I didn't think I could get a job," she said, "so I grabbed The Sandpiper and let them pay their million dollars." She also noted that she never thought the film would be "an artistic masterpiece". Work of art or not, once Elizabeth was back in front of the cameras on a soundstage, she couldn't have been happier. The movie began in Big Sur, and ended in Paris. All of Elizabeth's children were there with her, including Maria (who had undergone a remarkable rehabilitation by this time, and who also had her own governess and nurse).

After a day of filming, Elizabeth and Richard would customarily have drinks together at the bar of the Lancaster Hotel. One evening, as the Burtons relaxed, three people rushed into the bar, two women and a man. The man began taking photographs and, before Elizabeth and Richard knew what was happening, rushed off. One of the women then began speaking in German, her words tumbling out quickly as she frantically motioned toward her friend. Suddenly, it hit Elizabeth: The woman's friend was Maria's birth mother. "Is this [she said the woman's name]?" Elizabeth asked. "Yes, this is her," admitted her friend. "I'm going to interpret for her." Elizabeth and Richard then realized that Maria's mother had been brought to them for a tabloid photo opportunity. Taylor was enraged. "You're no friend of hers," she screamed at the woman. "You're a journalist. And I'm going to kill you if you don't get out of here, now!"

"No. I am a friend of hers," the woman protested.

"Leave!" Richard bellowed. The woman ran from the room, leaving Maria's distressed natural mother with the Burtons. Elizabeth took her by the arm and urged her to sit.

Luckily, the Burtons' trusted attorney and good friend, Aaron Frosch - who spoke German - happened to be coming by the hotel to meet with them. Slowly the story unfolded. Apparently the editor of a gossip magazine in France had contacted Maria's natural mother in Germany and told her that the Taylors wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with her. She believed them, and that's why she was in France. Actually, it was all a ruse so that the publication could obtain photographs of Maria's poor natural mother in the same room with her rich adopted mother for a sensational story.

"Elizabeth felt awful about it," said Marie Bentkover. "She realized that these people's lives were forever changed by having an association with her. Elizabeth and Richard bought the woman a plane ticket so that she could return to Germany."

The next morning found the Burtons back on the set of The Sandpiper. Elizabeth had chosen Vincente Minnelli, who had guided her when she was still in her teens in two of her most successful early films, Father of the Bride and Father's Little Dividend, to direct the film, in which Elizabeth portrays an artist who has a complicated affair with an Episcopal minister, played by Richard. Elizabeth had wanted Sammy Davis Jr., whom she had recently befriended in New York, to essay the role of the man she leaves for the Burton character, but producer Martin Ransohoff felt the idea was "too ahead of its time, though it surely would have caused quite a sensation having Taylor and Davis involved in a romance on the screen in the 1960s." Future action star Charles Bronson ended up with the role.

When The Sandpiper was finally released in 1965, fans stormed Radio City Music Hall in New York for the premiere, to see Elizabeth on the screen for the first time in two years. The movie's theme, "The Shadow of Your Smile" became a hit record for Tony Bennett and remains a popular standard even today. The film was a box-office smash, bringing in more than $10 million. If nothing else, it validated the commerciality of its stars because, in truth, the movie suffered from a weak story that an even weaker script could not overcome. Despite brisk ticket sales, the Burtons knew they had made what Elizabeth referred to as "a real turkey". When she received one lone good review for her performance in it, she quipped, "How dare that writer! I'm suing for libel."

The Books: "Life Is a Banquet" (Rosalind Russell)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Life Is A Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

Marvelous book. Laugh-out-loud funny, touching inspiring, serious - with awesome character sketches (her sister Duchess will live on in my memory FOREVER) and just a real joie-de-vivre feeling. You like her SO much. She seems like a great dame. Made good friends, kept them for life, had a great relationship with her husband, had a rocky road of a career (she was one of those actresses "hard to place") - but had the great good fortune to NAIL it in one or two crucial roles in films that will live on forever. She made her mark, man. Imagine a world without His Girl Friday, or imagine that film with any other actress in it. Noooo!!

Her autobiography was published after she had finally succumbed to cancer. She had lost both of her breasts, she was weakened to the point of needing oxygen, a wheelchair ... and yet still: every day, she would dress up, in a lovely suit, and have lunch (with martinis) with her husband. Her husband of 35 years or something like that - Freddie Brisson. They were set up by Cary Grant, who was the best man at their wedding in 1941.

Freddie wrote a prologue to her book. He writes:

After she died I found a petition she had tucked away in her prayer book. It said in part, "Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by."

Freddie writes of their courtship. Rosalind gave him a HELL of a hard time. He would call to ask her out, and her maid would answer the phone, and he would hear Rosalind bellowing in the background: "Tell him I'm out!!" hahahaha But he was persistent. The two of them went to the races, they went out dancing until 2 o'clock in the morning ... but still. She held him off. She was Hollywood's "Bachelor Girl", after all. She had a great career, and a great life. It would have to be a prrreeeety damn good offer for her to give that up ... and she knew that. She put Brisson through his paces.

Listen to his story of his proposal:

The first time I proposed, she didn't accept. I persisted. "I'm going to write your mother and ask for your hand." And I did. "There's no way I'm going to get rid of you, is there?" Rosalind finally said, laughing. But when she gave up, she gave up on her own terms. "I don't like any of these proposals after you've had an evening out. I'm not interested in that nonsense. If you want to propose, then come around at seven o'clock in the morning, and put a white handkerchief on the ground and kneel down and ask for my hand."

At seven o'clock the next morning Roz at last accepted.

The two of them were faithfully married from 1941 to 1976, when she passed away.

Rosalind Russell, in her book, comes off as a person who had her head on straight. Much of that could probably be attributed to her family, and the values they instilled in her. It was a humorous eccentric family, full of siblings ... all powerhouses ... full of accomplishment and lunacy. They were a family who loved to laugh. You can see that in her face. Her face is made for laughter. She comes off as a loyal person. If she was your friend, she was your friend for life. She was quite a clotheshorse and was also responsible for launching the careers of a couple of up-and-coming designers. James Galanos was one of them. He was her dressmaker and stylist for decades.

Her husband, Freddie Brisson, writes in the introduction a story that brings tears to my eyes:

In 1960, after she had the first mastectomy, Rosalind went to [James] Galanos. He says it was the only time he ever saw her break down. She had come to his office, very crisp, very businesslike. "I'm going to tell you something nobody in the world knows except Freddie and my doctor. I've had my breast removed, and I want to keep it quiet. So long as I can be active, I don't want to be thought a freak, I don't want people looking at me in person or on the screen and wondering about my sex life." (You have to consider the era. Women had not yet begun to go public about their mastectomies.)

"I want you to start thinking in terms of how I can now be dressed," Rosalind said to Jimmy, and then she began to take her clothes off. She started to cry, and he saw that she could hardly lift her left arm, it was so swollen, and he broke down too. From that day forward, he specially designed every piece of her clothing, and neither he nor his fitter ever told a soul.

She was an actress, not a glamour girl or a starlet. She could never play an ingenue. She was too much of a wisecracker. Her face was too angular to be considered naive or youthful or even, in certain angles, beautiful. Even as a toddler, she looks like she's about to bark out some snarky comment. She had to grow into herself before Hollywood really knew where to place her. I love journeys like hers. It gives hope to all of the odd ones out there, the misfits, the ones who don't conform - not because they don't WANT to, but because they flat out CAN'T. She was one of those.

The book sparkles with life. For example, often in autobiographies like these - the childhood sections come off as schmaltzy or cliched in some way. It's hard to write believably about childhood. You have to be specific. Get rid of the golden mist of nostalgia before you try to do it.

But listen to one of Russell's stories:

We children would be up on the third floor -- we had a billiard room there; my father played billiards, not pool, and to this day I can shoot so well, people think I must have earned my living at it -- playing games and racketing around over my mother's head, while she sat downstairs doing those name tapes. We had turned an alcove on the third floor into a bowling alley, and we also had a pool table.

My poor father, he never made a bet in his life, he didn't approve of betting, and he brought up a bunch of gamblers. After he died those of us who were still in school used to come home at different hours -- sometimes just for weekends -- and there was always a crap game going in my father's library. My mother permitted it, and stayed to supervise. The dice were going all the time, and I remember arriving late one Friday night and having a chum of one of my brothers, a young man who didn't know I was a member of the family, warn me against the Russells. "Do you know those people?" he whispered. "Be careful, they're all sharp shooters."

And in the background my relatives were yelling, "Get your money up, get your money up, it;s all cash here ..."

Now I don't know about YOU, but I want to hang out at the Russell house.

"Do you know these people?" hahahahahaha

A terrific book all-around. Read it, that's all.

Here's an excerpt that has to do with His Girl Friday. Listen to how smart she is about acting, process, directing. She is totally in charge. Just let her GO. Prepare the space for her, and let her GO.

Clip from His Girl Friday below.

EXCERPT FROM Life Is A Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

The next morning, going into New York on the train with my brother-in-law, Chet La Roche, and most of the people who had been at dinner the night before, everyone had his own copy of the New York Times, and we were all reading, and it said in the New York Times that Rosalind Russell was to play this part in a picture called His Girl Friday. Then it said the names of all the women who'd turned the part down. Howard Hawks, who would be directing, had tried to get Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur; he'd asked every leading woman in town before Harry Cohn had stuck him with me. (I was told later that Cohn had asked Hawks to go up to Grauman's Chinese Theatre and take a look at The Women, but I don't think he ever went.)

Anyway, coming down from Fairfield, I didn't dare look up from the paper. I kept thinking about all these people saying, "Oh, how marvelous."

I arrived back in California in a bad mood, and California was in the middle of a heat wave. I'd built my first swimming pool, a salt-water pool (you just dumped salt in, but you had to have special pipes), and it was about a hundred and seven degrees outside, and I was supposed to go down and see Hawks, but I kept brooding about being humiliated in the New York Times, and before I went to Columbia, I jumped in the pool, got my dress and hair all wet, and then went and sat in Hawks' outer office.

I was always so sassy, it seems to me, so unattractive, now that I think about it.

Hawks came out, did a triple take, and ushered me inside.

"You didn't want me for this, did you?" I said. (Besides being sassy, I was forever assaulting some guy -- Bill Powell, Howard Hawks -- with the news that he really hadn't wanted me.)

"It'll be all right," Hawks said. "You'll be fine. Nonw go to Wardrobe and tell them I'd like you in a suit with stripes, rather flashy-looking."

"Okay, Mr. Hawks, goodbye," I said. "I'll see you later."

His Girl Friday was to be a remake of The Front Page, a story about the newspaper business. Columbia had bought the property from Howard Hughes, who'd already made it once with Pat O'Brien and Lee Tracy as the reporter and editor. It had been Hawks's idea to change the Hildy Johnson character into a woman.

We'd been shooting two days when I began to wonder if his instructing me that my suit should be kind of hard-boiled-looking was the only advice I was going to get from Mr. Hawks.

He sprawled in a chair, way down on the end of his spine, and his eyes were like two blue cubes of ice, and he just looked at me.

After the second day I went to Cary Grant. "What is it with this guy? Am I doing what he wants?"

"Oh, sure, Ross," Cary said. (All the English call me Ross.) "If he didn't like it, he'd tell you."

"I can't work that way," I said. I went over to where Hawks was sitting. "Mr. Hawks," I said, "I have to know whether this is all right. Do you want it faster? Slower? What would you like?"

Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. "You just keep pushin' him around the way you're doin'," he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

He'd been watching Cary and me for two days, and I'd thrown a handbag at Cary, which was my own idea, and missed hitting him, and Cary had said, "You used to be better than that," and Hawks left it all in. It's a good director who sees what an actor can do, studies his cast, learns about them personally, knows how to get the best out of them. You play the fiddle and he conducts. I think filming the scene is the easiest thing. It's preparing for it, rehearsing with it, trying to get at the guts of it, trying to give it meaning and freshness so that the other actor will relate to you and think of you as his mother or his wife or his sister, rather than just reciting lines, that's the actor's real work. A good director knows how to help you with it.

A good director also knows when not to direct. Nobody ever tried to direct Gable. They let Gable be Gable. I don't mean that he wouldn't take direction, but when he walked in with the gun and the uniform, and he'd just been over the top, what more could anybody do about that? Gable was the same sitting on the sidelines as he was when he got up and played the scene, and nobody wanted him to be anything else. People like Gable, Wayne, they're personalities, and a personality is an asset, you don't destroy it or mess with it.

Grant was different; he wasn't just a personality, he could immediately go off into a spin and become any character that was called for. He was terrific to work with because he's a true comic, in the sense that comedy is in the mind, the brain, the cortex. (Every actor you play with helps you or hurts you, there's no in between. It' s like tennis, you can't play alone or with a dead ball; and a lot of pictures fail right on the set, not in the script, where they say it starts. A group of actors and a director can wreck a good script; I've seen it happen.)

Cary loved to ad lib. He'd be standing there, leaning over, practically parallel to the ground, eyes flashing, extemporizing as he went, but he was in with another ad-libber. I enjoyed working that way too. So in His Girl Friday we went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it.

Then I started worrying that all this noisiness and newsroom high spirits might seem too chaotic to a watcher, and one night after we were finished I again went to Hawks. "I'm afraid," I said, "that audiences won't follow us."

"You're forgetting the scene you're gonna play with the criminal," Hawks said. "It's gonna be so quiet, so silent. You'll just whisper to him, you'll whisper, 'Did you kill that guy?' and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when we're with Grant, we don't change it. You just rivet in on him all the time."

Everybody in the world talks to me about that picture, though it happened in 1940 and they couldn't get another actress to do it. I've had so many indifferent directors, the kind who didn't prepare, didn't do their homework, faked their way through (and the actor is really the victim of the director), but I've been good with good directors, and for me to get Cukor and Hawks in rapid succession was terrific.

(That an actor needs not only decent direction, but decent material goes without saying. You're home free if you get material that holds you up. George Burns, who won the Academy Award for his part in The Sunshine Boys, told me it didn't even feel like work, playing that Neil Simon script - "The stuff is so funny, the words he uses, the way he puts it together." Being given good material is like being assigned to bake a cake - I might as well add baking to the other similes, tennis, violin playing, I've hauled in here - and having the batter made for you. It's all there, you only have to pour it in the pan, get the oven going at 350 degrees, and you're home free, everybody says you're a master cook.)

Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, "Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch," and Cary said, "Well, I don't want to kill the woman," and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, "Try killin' 'er."

And once Cary looked straight out of a scene and said to Hawks (about something I was trying), "Is she going to do that?" and Hawks left the moment in the picture -- Cary's right there on film, asking an unseen director about my plans.

The Books: "Life Is a Banquet" (Rosalind Russell)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Life Is A Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

Marvelous book. Laugh-out-loud funny, touching inspiring, serious - with awesome character sketches (her sister Duchess will live on in my memory FOREVER) and just a real joie-de-vivre feeling. You like her SO much. She seems like a great dame. Made good friends, kept them for life, had a great relationship with her husband, had a rocky road of a career (she was one of those actresses "hard to place") - but had the great good fortune to NAIL it in one or two crucial roles in films that will live on forever. She made her mark, man. Imagine a world without His Girl Friday, or imagine that film with any other actress in it. Noooo!!

Her autobiography was published after she had finally succumbed to cancer. She had lost both of her breasts, she was weakened to the point of needing oxygen, a wheelchair ... and yet still: every day, she would dress up, in a lovely suit, and have lunch (with martinis) with her husband. Her husband of 35 years or something like that - Freddie Brisson. They were set up by Cary Grant, who was the best man at their wedding in 1941.

Freddie wrote a prologue to her book. He writes:

After she died I found a petition she had tucked away in her prayer book. It said in part, "Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by."

Freddie writes of their courtship. Rosalind gave him a HELL of a hard time. He would call to ask her out, and her maid would answer the phone, and he would hear Rosalind bellowing in the background: "Tell him I'm out!!" hahahaha But he was persistent. The two of them went to the races, they went out dancing until 2 o'clock in the morning ... but still. She held him off. She was Hollywood's "Bachelor Girl", after all. She had a great career, and a great life. It would have to be a prrreeeety damn good offer for her to give that up ... and she knew that. She put Brisson through his paces.

Listen to his story of his proposal:

The first time I proposed, she didn't accept. I persisted. "I'm going to write your mother and ask for your hand." And I did. "There's no way I'm going to get rid of you, is there?" Rosalind finally said, laughing. But when she gave up, she gave up on her own terms. "I don't like any of these proposals after you've had an evening out. I'm not interested in that nonsense. If you want to propose, then come around at seven o'clock in the morning, and put a white handkerchief on the ground and kneel down and ask for my hand."

At seven o'clock the next morning Roz at last accepted.

The two of them were faithfully married from 1941 to 1976, when she passed away.

Rosalind Russell, in her book, comes off as a person who had her head on straight. Much of that could probably be attributed to her family, and the values they instilled in her. It was a humorous eccentric family, full of siblings ... all powerhouses ... full of accomplishment and lunacy. They were a family who loved to laugh. You can see that in her face. Her face is made for laughter. She comes off as a loyal person. If she was your friend, she was your friend for life. She was quite a clotheshorse and was also responsible for launching the careers of a couple of up-and-coming designers. James Galanos was one of them. He was her dressmaker and stylist for decades.

Her husband, Freddie Brisson, writes in the introduction a story that brings tears to my eyes:

In 1960, after she had the first mastectomy, Rosalind went to [James] Galanos. He says it was the only time he ever saw her break down. She had come to his office, very crisp, very businesslike. "I'm going to tell you something nobody in the world knows except Freddie and my doctor. I've had my breast removed, and I want to keep it quiet. So long as I can be active, I don't want to be thought a freak, I don't want people looking at me in person or on the screen and wondering about my sex life." (You have to consider the era. Women had not yet begun to go public about their mastectomies.)

"I want you to start thinking in terms of how I can now be dressed," Rosalind said to Jimmy, and then she began to take her clothes off. She started to cry, and he saw that she could hardly lift her left arm, it was so swollen, and he broke down too. From that day forward, he specially designed every piece of her clothing, and neither he nor his fitter ever told a soul.

She was an actress, not a glamour girl or a starlet. She could never play an ingenue. She was too much of a wisecracker. Her face was too angular to be considered naive or youthful or even, in certain angles, beautiful. Even as a toddler, she looks like she's about to bark out some snarky comment. She had to grow into herself before Hollywood really knew where to place her. I love journeys like hers. It gives hope to all of the odd ones out there, the misfits, the ones who don't conform - not because they don't WANT to, but because they flat out CAN'T. She was one of those.

The book sparkles with life. For example, often in autobiographies like these - the childhood sections come off as schmaltzy or cliched in some way. It's hard to write believably about childhood. You have to be specific. Get rid of the golden mist of nostalgia before you try to do it.

But listen to one of Russell's stories:

We children would be up on the third floor -- we had a billiard room there; my father played billiards, not pool, and to this day I can shoot so well, people think I must have earned my living at it -- playing games and racketing around over my mother's head, while she sat downstairs doing those name tapes. We had turned an alcove on the third floor into a bowling alley, and we also had a pool table.

My poor father, he never made a bet in his life, he didn't approve of betting, and he brought up a bunch of gamblers. After he died those of us who were still in school used to come home at different hours -- sometimes just for weekends -- and there was always a crap game going in my father's library. My mother permitted it, and stayed to supervise. The dice were going all the time, and I remember arriving late one Friday night and having a chum of one of my brothers, a young man who didn't know I was a member of the family, warn me against the Russells. "Do you know those people?" he whispered. "Be careful, they're all sharp shooters."

And in the background my relatives were yelling, "Get your money up, get your money up, it;s all cash here ..."

Now I don't know about YOU, but I want to hang out at the Russell house.

"Do you know these people?" hahahahahaha

A terrific book all-around. Read it, that's all.

Here's an excerpt that has to do with His Girl Friday. Listen to how smart she is about acting, process, directing. She is totally in charge. Just let her GO. Prepare the space for her, and let her GO.

Clip from His Girl Friday below.

EXCERPT FROM Life Is A Banquet, by Rosalind Russell (and Chris Chase)

The next morning, going into New York on the train with my brother-in-law, Chet La Roche, and most of the people who had been at dinner the night before, everyone had his own copy of the New York Times, and we were all reading, and it said in the New York Times that Rosalind Russell was to play this part in a picture called His Girl Friday. Then it said the names of all the women who'd turned the part down. Howard Hawks, who would be directing, had tried to get Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur; he'd asked every leading woman in town before Harry Cohn had stuck him with me. (I was told later that Cohn had asked Hawks to go up to Grauman's Chinese Theatre and take a look at The Women, but I don't think he ever went.)

Anyway, coming down from Fairfield, I didn't dare look up from the paper. I kept thinking about all these people saying, "Oh, how marvelous."

I arrived back in California in a bad mood, and California was in the middle of a heat wave. I'd built my first swimming pool, a salt-water pool (you just dumped salt in, but you had to have special pipes), and it was about a hundred and seven degrees outside, and I was supposed to go down and see Hawks, but I kept brooding about being humiliated in the New York Times, and before I went to Columbia, I jumped in the pool, got my dress and hair all wet, and then went and sat in Hawks' outer office.

I was always so sassy, it seems to me, so unattractive, now that I think about it.

Hawks came out, did a triple take, and ushered me inside.

"You didn't want me for this, did you?" I said. (Besides being sassy, I was forever assaulting some guy -- Bill Powell, Howard Hawks -- with the news that he really hadn't wanted me.)

"It'll be all right," Hawks said. "You'll be fine. Nonw go to Wardrobe and tell them I'd like you in a suit with stripes, rather flashy-looking."

"Okay, Mr. Hawks, goodbye," I said. "I'll see you later."

His Girl Friday was to be a remake of The Front Page, a story about the newspaper business. Columbia had bought the property from Howard Hughes, who'd already made it once with Pat O'Brien and Lee Tracy as the reporter and editor. It had been Hawks's idea to change the Hildy Johnson character into a woman.

We'd been shooting two days when I began to wonder if his instructing me that my suit should be kind of hard-boiled-looking was the only advice I was going to get from Mr. Hawks.

He sprawled in a chair, way down on the end of his spine, and his eyes were like two blue cubes of ice, and he just looked at me.

After the second day I went to Cary Grant. "What is it with this guy? Am I doing what he wants?"

"Oh, sure, Ross," Cary said. (All the English call me Ross.) "If he didn't like it, he'd tell you."

"I can't work that way," I said. I went over to where Hawks was sitting. "Mr. Hawks," I said, "I have to know whether this is all right. Do you want it faster? Slower? What would you like?"

Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. "You just keep pushin' him around the way you're doin'," he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

He'd been watching Cary and me for two days, and I'd thrown a handbag at Cary, which was my own idea, and missed hitting him, and Cary had said, "You used to be better than that," and Hawks left it all in. It's a good director who sees what an actor can do, studies his cast, learns about them personally, knows how to get the best out of them. You play the fiddle and he conducts. I think filming the scene is the easiest thing. It's preparing for it, rehearsing with it, trying to get at the guts of it, trying to give it meaning and freshness so that the other actor will relate to you and think of you as his mother or his wife or his sister, rather than just reciting lines, that's the actor's real work. A good director knows how to help you with it.

A good director also knows when not to direct. Nobody ever tried to direct Gable. They let Gable be Gable. I don't mean that he wouldn't take direction, but when he walked in with the gun and the uniform, and he'd just been over the top, what more could anybody do about that? Gable was the same sitting on the sidelines as he was when he got up and played the scene, and nobody wanted him to be anything else. People like Gable, Wayne, they're personalities, and a personality is an asset, you don't destroy it or mess with it.

Grant was different; he wasn't just a personality, he could immediately go off into a spin and become any character that was called for. He was terrific to work with because he's a true comic, in the sense that comedy is in the mind, the brain, the cortex. (Every actor you play with helps you or hurts you, there's no in between. It' s like tennis, you can't play alone or with a dead ball; and a lot of pictures fail right on the set, not in the script, where they say it starts. A group of actors and a director can wreck a good script; I've seen it happen.)

Cary loved to ad lib. He'd be standing there, leaning over, practically parallel to the ground, eyes flashing, extemporizing as he went, but he was in with another ad-libber. I enjoyed working that way too. So in His Girl Friday we went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it.

Then I started worrying that all this noisiness and newsroom high spirits might seem too chaotic to a watcher, and one night after we were finished I again went to Hawks. "I'm afraid," I said, "that audiences won't follow us."

"You're forgetting the scene you're gonna play with the criminal," Hawks said. "It's gonna be so quiet, so silent. You'll just whisper to him, you'll whisper, 'Did you kill that guy?' and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when we're with Grant, we don't change it. You just rivet in on him all the time."

Everybody in the world talks to me about that picture, though it happened in 1940 and they couldn't get another actress to do it. I've had so many indifferent directors, the kind who didn't prepare, didn't do their homework, faked their way through (and the actor is really the victim of the director), but I've been good with good directors, and for me to get Cukor and Hawks in rapid succession was terrific.

(That an actor needs not only decent direction, but decent material goes without saying. You're home free if you get material that holds you up. George Burns, who won the Academy Award for his part in The Sunshine Boys, told me it didn't even feel like work, playing that Neil Simon script - "The stuff is so funny, the words he uses, the way he puts it together." Being given good material is like being assigned to bake a cake - I might as well add baking to the other similes, tennis, violin playing, I've hauled in here - and having the batter made for you. It's all there, you only have to pour it in the pan, get the oven going at 350 degrees, and you're home free, everybody says you're a master cook.)

Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, "Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch," and Cary said, "Well, I don't want to kill the woman," and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, "Try killin' 'er."

And once Cary looked straight out of a scene and said to Hawks (about something I was trying), "Is she going to do that?" and Hawks left the moment in the picture -- Cary's right there on film, asking an unseen director about my plans.

The Books: "Ginger: My Story" (Ginger Rogers)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Ginger: My Story, by Ginger Rogers

This is my kind of celebrity memoir. It is juicy, gossipy, defensive, and full of sentences like, "I need to set the record straight". In her Introduction, she uses the words "pernicious rumors". She wants to tell her story from HER side, and she just babbles (entertainingly) on and on for almost 400 pages, and you just can't put it down. There is an invisible audience of critics in her mind, reading it, and she writes to them. "Yes, I had a lot of marriages. So what? I loved being married." You know, when you live in the public eye for your whole life, you probably get used to having people (that you know and don't know) weigh in on your behavior - be it professional or personal - and she's internalized that. She can't help herself.

A lot of the book has a "I know what you're going to say, but let me explain" tone. I happen to despise that kind of writing when it's done by bloggers - I've written about it before. I despise it because I fell into that trap in my early days as a blogger, when I suddenly had a lot of readers, many of whom found my love of movies to be irritating. (Don't ask. These people are now long gone - well, one or two hangers-on). But anyway, I found my writing to be going in that defensive direction - starting paragraphs with, "Now, I know what you're going to say ..." Everything needed to be qualified, adjusted. I was constantly acknowledging the people who found me irritating. Terrible writing!! It drove me crazy. And Beth emailed me at one point, mentioning that tendency of mine, and telling me it weakened my writing. She basically was like, "Just say what you want to say!" My first feeling when I read her email was defensive ... but in the next moment, I realized: She is 100% right. I don't like writing this way, anyway. So I consciously got rid of that tendency. Having been through that, I notice it in others, I suppose ... and to me, at least with bloggers, it makes the blogger seem WAY too self-important. As though they have THRONGS of people weighing in at all times ... and although that FEELS true, it really isn't, come on, let's be honest. (Reminds me of the funny cartoon Larry just posted on his site.) Just write your opinion, let people criticize - answer in the comments if you want - but don't muddy up your writing with "Now I know that some of you out there feel ..." caveats.

HOWEVER. When it comes to giants of the film industry - that kind of thing is just a joy to behold. I know it's biased. That's the whole point to reading memoirs of famous movie stars. I WANT bias. I WANT them to stick up for themselves, and tell their side, and set the record straight ... That's why I think Lana Turner's autobiography is seriously one of the best out there. Try to put that book down. TRY. And if anyone had the "public" weighing in on her behavior - it was that one!!

So Ginger sets forth to dispel the "pernicious rumors", to talk back to her critics, to tell it like it REALLY was - and all of that makes for a beautifully entertaining, sometimes funny read. She's likable. I read this book years ago, when it first came out, and there was much about Ginger Rogers that I did not know. My bad!

I grew up poring over the pages of TV Guide for any sign that a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie was playing. I ADORED them. It seemed to be from a different world. Still in the same century I was living in, but boy, nothing was recognizable to me. Where were those big nightclubs with shiny floors and flowing curtains? Even their voices sounded different. Nobody talked like Fred Astaire in MY world. They seemed ancient - not to mention in black and white - but also so exciting, and beautiful, and I never ever got sick of seeing those movies (it's been almost 40 years now, and I'm STILL not sick of seeing them.)

When I was 11 years old, my drama teacher (Jan Grant, let's give the props) had us all write a report on someone who inspired us from movies or theatre. I wrote my report on Fred Astaire. I remember how hard I worked on that thing. I must have taken books out of the library. I set about to write down Fred's entire journey - with his sister Adele, etc. - and I remember my dad saying to me, gently, "I think what Jan is looking for is not the biography, Sheila - but what he means to you." I have tears in my eyes. He was trying to help me focus. I don't think I took it that way at the time, because I was really proud of my essay - with its "Fred Astaire was born on a cold dark day" details ... but I did take his advice, and spent the last 10 pages of the thing talking about why he was so great, and which movies of his I loved, and why, etc. etc. Thank you, Dad.

My first experience of Ginger Rogers was those movies, and for years I had no idea - ZERO - NONE - NADA - that she was such a heavy-hitting actress as well. One of the big female stars of RKO. It was Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and Irene Dunne - there's a documentary about those three and their competition included in the special features of my Bringing Up Baby DVD. It's fascinating. They each had a niche, they dominated the industry, but they were also pitted against one another.

Rogers got her start in vaudeville as a teenager, did a couple of movies, and then appeared on Broadway in a musical called Girl Crazy. Fred Astaire didn't do the choreography but he was hired to help out. This was how they met. Girl Crazy made Ginger Rogers a Broadway star. With the power of that success behind her, she signed a contract with Paramount, but then got out of it (I love all the contractual stuff - I've mentioned that before. I love to hear the business side of things) - and signed with RKO. It was under the auspices of RKO that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their many many films together. They were the biggest stars in the world. Those movies came at a time when America really needed them. And also - they were unlike the other musicals at the time ... those two completely revolutionized that tired genre (it was already tired!) and made it something new and fresh. Not to mention the cinematography ... If you watch the filming of those dance scenes, you can see that the camera glides and flows WITH the couple, at the same time that we always see both of them in the screen at the same time. I wish I wish I wish that musicals today would stop it with the jumpcuts and Flashdance-inspired fragmented filmmaking - and just let us see the dancing, dammit. Astaire said about Rogers: "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."

The thing I guess I didn't know about Ginger was that she was primarily an actress. After a decade of musicals, she made the unpopular decision to stop for a while and do straight drama. It paid off. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle. If you've seen the film (or any of her other straight dramas), you know how good she was. (And I'm sure De could speak to all of this far better than I could. She's probably the biggest Ginger Rogers fan that I know!)

Ginger Rogers was one of those people who was known, primarily, for one thing. She was extremely fortunate - and also had a magic about her that came out when dancing with Astaire that still is money in the bank. Like, you can cash in that check for centuries. Actresses dream of "hitting" something like that - not just being successful - but tapping into something "magic" ... and she did.

But my favorite stories in her chatty defensive funny book are about her struggles to either be taken seriously, or her lobbying for parts that nobody was thinking of her for, because of her reputation for being an actress for musicals.

Garson Kanin, in his chatty awesome book Hollywood tells the story of Ginger Rogers campaigning HARD to play Queen Elizabeth in John Ford's Mary of Scotland ... and it just really moves me, because she knew, in her heart, how good she would be, but she also knew she had to prove it. She was a gigantic star. Didn't matter. Not everybody can play everything. You have to PROVE it to the powers-that-be and proving it takes a lot of guts. Because, more often than not, you are facing a group of people who basically don't see you for the part, don't want you for the part ... it is an unwelcoming atmosphere from the get-go. I talked about this a bit when I mentioned Camryn Manheim's journey as an actress and how she had to SHOW the client that she could be a mechanic, even though they had it in their heads that they wanted a man for the part. Guts. It is my belief that those who become most successful are not necessarily the most talented - but those who do not CAVE in moments such as that. Those who do not CHOKE but "show up", 100%.

So although Ginger Rogers' book is chock-full of great stuff, I chose the excerpt that had to do with her trying to get the part of Queen Elizabeth, because THAT is why Ginger Rogers' career spanned 50 years, I am convinced. She didn't even GET the part. Doesn't matter in the slightest. It's the attitude I am talking about.

30 years later, Ginger Rogers said to Garson Kanin, "They should have given me that part. I would have been sensational."

I agree.

I've also included a clip below from Top Hat.

EXCERPT FROM Ginger: My Story, by Ginger Rogers

At a dinner party one evening, I cornered Pan Berman. "Pan," I said, "I know you're producing Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland and that Kate Hepburn is starring. I've also heard that John Ford is directing. Now, Pan, you have tested everybody under the sun but Shirley Temple or me for the role of Queen Elizabeth. Why not let me test for the role?"

"You?" interrupted Mr. Berman. "Why would you want to play the role of such an embittered woman?"

"Oh, come on, Pan, you know I want to get out of those soft chiffon dresses and play something that has some starch in it."

"Dear Ginger," he said, patiently patting me on the shoulder. "You should be glad you do what you do so well. Why don't you just stick to your high-heeled slippers and be happy?"

With that, he gently brushed me off with a smile.

With that, I determined to devise a plan.

I called Leland Hayward. "You're my agent, why don't you talk to Berman about my playing the role of Elizabeth? He won't listen to me."

"Why don't you corner John Ford?" suggested Leland. "Catch him at the commissary during lunch."

I rarely went into the commissary while filming - unless I had to be there for a conference; I preferred to have lunch in my dressing room. Since I wasn't filming, I decided to follow Leland's suggestion. I found out the day and time that the tests were to be made and I went into the commissary. As Ford and some of his camera crew were leaving, I went up to him and told him what I wanted. I knew if I showed up as Ginger Rogers, I wouldn't get to first base. However, if I appeared under a false name, all made up as Elizabeth, the test I made would be judged only on the basis of my performance. John Ford loved a practical joke, and the idea of fooling Pan Berman tickled his funny bone. "Sounds terrific. Call me at home and we'll figure it out."

I called Leland with the good news and told him I thought I should pretend to be British so I'd even have the right accent. Leland loved the idea, and we decided I would become "Lady Ainsley." Listen, if I was going to be British, I might as well go all the way and be an aristocrat! Leland called Pan and told him he had a visiting British actress who might be talked into taking the role.

I got in touch with Mel Berns in makeup and Edward Stevenson in wardrobe. They were both sworn to secrecy. A lot of painstaking detail went into this charade; among other things, I had to get a studio pass under my pseudonym, Lady Ainsley.

The day of the test, I wore clothes different from any I had been seen in before, donned a brunette wig, and put a turban around my head. At the studio, I didn't go through the automobile gate but headed for the Gower Street door. The Gower Street entrance was the first test of my disguise. Studio pass in hand and my British accent at the ready, it worked like a dream. I galloped to Mel Berns's chair and he went to work. First, a plastic skull cap was put over my head. It reached down to my eyebrows, and created the appearance of a very high forehead. Later, a faithfully designed eighteenth-century wig was put over the skull cap. The period makeup for Elizabethan times was a ghostly white, for men as well as women. You can't imagine how this white stuff changed my features. Mel gave my eyes a beady look by creating a narrowness around them and painted a slit-like mouth over my full lips. Eddie Stevenson found a period costume with the full regalia of queenly dress, including a huge stiff ruffle around my neck. If clothes make the woman, then I felt like the real Queen of England! As far as knowing that the queen was Ginger, I didn't think even Lelee would have recognized me.

Leland played his part well, too; he phoned John Ford and gave him the lowdown on my character. Lady Ainsley had been playing Shakespearean roles for the past five years on the London stage where her name was well known. While her husband, Lord Ainsley, was on safari in Africa hunting lions, Lady Ainsley had accepted an invitation from Mary Pickford to stay at Pickfair for a fortnight. Though she was uninterested in making an American movie, Lady Ainsley was persuaded to do the test as a lark. She was a great admirer of John Ford's films, and would enjoy meeting Katharine Hepburn.

John Ford ate it up. Leland then advised John to call Pan Berman and give him the story. "If he doesn't buy it, tell him to call me, and I'll convince him."

When the time came for me to test, I casually strolled onto the stage in this fantastic regalia and felt ten feet tall! Hiding behind character makeup was a new experience for me. Three other women in courtly costumes stood on the set waiting for the camera test. One of them was Anita Colby, a very good friend of my mother's and mine. Each of the ladies-in-waiting curtsied as the assistant director introduced them to "Lady Ainsley". Even Anita bowed; I could hardly wait to tell Lela. I moved off to the test stage and made a grand entrance. No one recognized me. The entire crew stepped aside deferentially, giving me a wide berth. The rumor was that Lady Ainsley was doing this test as a favor to John Ford. I had a ball fooling all the folks I'd worked with month after month. There's nothing Hollywood loves more than a bona fide title, and Lady Ainsley had one ... or so they believed.

John Ford came onto the set and went right to me. He played it straight but I could see the twinkle in his eye.

"Lady Ainsley, we have never met. However, I have seen you perform. I was in London eighteen months ago."

"Perhaps you saw me with Maurice Evans in As You Like It," I answered in my high-toned British accent.

"Yes, that must be it. My, that's wonderful makeup you're wearing. No one could possibly recognize you," he said audibly, and then, lowering his voice so only I could hear, whispered, "I had to tell Hepburn who you are. She'd kill me if she found out later, and I've got to make this film with her."

Katharine Hepburn came onto the stage dressed in her Mary costume. "Miss Hepburn, this is Lady Ainsley," announced the director. Kate looked at me as one does at an adversary.

"Hello," she managed. Kate looked at me again with an indescribably expression.

John placed us for the test and gave the signal, "All right. Camera, action. Don't just sit there. Talk to each other."

We were seated in high-backed oak chairs and a large mahogany table stood in front of us. I turned to Kate, and in my best British accent I said, "I've enjoyed watching your performances very much, Miss Hepburn."

Although everything looked normal above the table, below decks Kate swung her leg back and kicked me in the shins. Her expression was unchanged as she muttered in a stage whisper, "You 0#%&*$!! Who do you think you're fooling?"

I was surprised by her outburst and looked to see if the sound boom was in place. If her remarks had been recorded, that would spoil the whole deal. Luckily, it was a silent test. I bit my tongue to keep from answering back. My composure was slipping, but somehow I managed to offer another weak-tea type compliment. Her look was that of the cat ready to pounce on the canary, and I was the canary. History was reversing itself. "Mary" was going to behead "Elizabeth"!

Ford broke the spell. "Look to the left, then turn to the right. Just keep talking to each other." I moved my mouth as though speaking, as Kate continued to glare at me.

"Thank you, Lady Ainsley," said Ford. "As soon as the other tests are over, I'll come into your dressing room."

I got up slowly from my chair, and turned to Kate. "Thank you, Miss Hepburn," I said through clenched teeth. "Thank you very much."

As I headed for the portable dressing room, I ran smack into my old buddy Eddie Rubin. Eddie wasn't in on this ruse as he hadn't been around when this idea was hatched. He looked right at me as if I was a stranger and let me pass. I waited for the bomb to explode over my disguise. But nothing happened until John Ford burst into the room and said in a loud voice, "Lady Ainsley, thank you so much for your time and trouble. I knew we interrupted your holiday, but in a day or two, we'll get back to you. Leland Hayward is representing you - correct?"

"Yes, that's right, Mr. Ford."

"Good. I will speak with Leland after we see the test. Your Shakespearean ability is known to us, but we needed to see how you photographed opposite Miss Hepburn. Mr. Berman and I will be seeing this footage sometime late tomorrow afternoon. Thank you again." And he disappeared.

I returned to my dressing room, got out of the Renaissance clothing, and then went over to Mel Burns to get the makeup removed. I slipped out of the studio without being detected, and when I reached home, I called Leland to describe the events. He roared at hearing how Kate had kicked me.

A couple of days later Leland called and told me Pan had seen the tests and liked them. Now he wanted them reshot in sound. My ruse was really snowballing!

Alas, someone leaked the story, and the next day Louella Parsons's column was devoted to the Lady Ainsley incident. Lolly sharply criticized me for spending the company's money on a practical joke. Louella loved to give me the "raspberry" whenever she could. Hedda Hopper, on the other hand, seemed to like me, and I liked her. I think this was because she secretly thanked Lelee for not accepting a job offer with the Los Angeles Times. They then offered it to Hedda - and the rest is history. But Louella was another story. Unfortunately, I was not Carole Lombard, who could get away with anything. Louella called it a "practical joke", but in my heart, it was serious. I wanted that part so much I could taste it. And I had no other way of getting a test for the role.

I raced to the telephone to call Berman's house, and spoke with his wife, Vi. She told me Pan had not seen the morning paper because he had gone to the races at Santa Anita early that morning. Shortly thereafter, a friend called and asked me to the races ... at Santa Anita. To go or not to go, that was my dilemma. What if I ran into Berman? I decided to take the risk of bumping into him. With twelve thousand people at the races, that wasn't very likely.

So far, so good! I was standing near the betting window with my friend when I heard a familiar voice behind me. "You little devil! You know, young lady, you really had me going." I turned to face Pan Berman. "That was the best trick ever pulled on me. I had no idea that you were that 'lady' I saw on the screen. I never would have guessed it was you!"

I laughed and suggested that I do a second test. To his great credit, Pan Berman wasn't the least bit angry. His sense of humor about this was far better than anyone could have expected. But I didn't get the second test and I didn't get the part. The role of Elizabeth was given to Florence Eldridge. Maybe it was just as well, because the film wasn't favorably reviewed by the public. And if I had played the role of Elizabeth, both the studio and the public would probably have laid their complaints at my door!

The Books: "Ginger: My Story" (Ginger Rogers)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Ginger: My Story, by Ginger Rogers

This is my kind of celebrity memoir. It is juicy, gossipy, defensive, and full of sentences like, "I need to set the record straight". In her Introduction, she uses the words "pernicious rumors". She wants to tell her story from HER side, and she just babbles (entertainingly) on and on for almost 400 pages, and you just can't put it down. There is an invisible audience of critics in her mind, reading it, and she writes to them. "Yes, I had a lot of marriages. So what? I loved being married." You know, when you live in the public eye for your whole life, you probably get used to having people (that you know and don't know) weigh in on your behavior - be it professional or personal - and she's internalized that. She can't help herself.

A lot of the book has a "I know what you're going to say, but let me explain" tone. I happen to despise that kind of writing when it's done by bloggers - I've written about it before. I despise it because I fell into that trap in my early days as a blogger, when I suddenly had a lot of readers, many of whom found my love of movies to be irritating. (Don't ask. These people are now long gone - well, one or two hangers-on). But anyway, I found my writing to be going in that defensive direction - starting paragraphs with, "Now, I know what you're going to say ..." Everything needed to be qualified, adjusted. I was constantly acknowledging the people who found me irritating. Terrible writing!! It drove me crazy. And Beth emailed me at one point, mentioning that tendency of mine, and telling me it weakened my writing. She basically was like, "Just say what you want to say!" My first feeling when I read her email was defensive ... but in the next moment, I realized: She is 100% right. I don't like writing this way, anyway. So I consciously got rid of that tendency. Having been through that, I notice it in others, I suppose ... and to me, at least with bloggers, it makes the blogger seem WAY too self-important. As though they have THRONGS of people weighing in at all times ... and although that FEELS true, it really isn't, come on, let's be honest. (Reminds me of the funny cartoon Larry just posted on his site.) Just write your opinion, let people criticize - answer in the comments if you want - but don't muddy up your writing with "Now I know that some of you out there feel ..." caveats.

HOWEVER. When it comes to giants of the film industry - that kind of thing is just a joy to behold. I know it's biased. That's the whole point to reading memoirs of famous movie stars. I WANT bias. I WANT them to stick up for themselves, and tell their side, and set the record straight ... That's why I think Lana Turner's autobiography is seriously one of the best out there. Try to put that book down. TRY. And if anyone had the "public" weighing in on her behavior - it was that one!!

So Ginger sets forth to dispel the "pernicious rumors", to talk back to her critics, to tell it like it REALLY was - and all of that makes for a beautifully entertaining, sometimes funny read. She's likable. I read this book years ago, when it first came out, and there was much about Ginger Rogers that I did not know. My bad!

I grew up poring over the pages of TV Guide for any sign that a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie was playing. I ADORED them. It seemed to be from a different world. Still in the same century I was living in, but boy, nothing was recognizable to me. Where were those big nightclubs with shiny floors and flowing curtains? Even their voices sounded different. Nobody talked like Fred Astaire in MY world. They seemed ancient - not to mention in black and white - but also so exciting, and beautiful, and I never ever got sick of seeing those movies (it's been almost 40 years now, and I'm STILL not sick of seeing them.)

When I was 11 years old, my drama teacher (Jan Grant, let's give the props) had us all write a report on someone who inspired us from movies or theatre. I wrote my report on Fred Astaire. I remember how hard I worked on that thing. I must have taken books out of the library. I set about to write down Fred's entire journey - with his sister Adele, etc. - and I remember my dad saying to me, gently, "I think what Jan is looking for is not the biography, Sheila - but what he means to you." I have tears in my eyes. He was trying to help me focus. I don't think I took it that way at the time, because I was really proud of my essay - with its "Fred Astaire was born on a cold dark day" details ... but I did take his advice, and spent the last 10 pages of the thing talking about why he was so great, and which movies of his I loved, and why, etc. etc. Thank you, Dad.

My first experience of Ginger Rogers was those movies, and for years I had no idea - ZERO - NONE - NADA - that she was such a heavy-hitting actress as well. One of the big female stars of RKO. It was Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and Irene Dunne - there's a documentary about those three and their competition included in the special features of my Bringing Up Baby DVD. It's fascinating. They each had a niche, they dominated the industry, but they were also pitted against one another.

Rogers got her start in vaudeville as a teenager, did a couple of movies, and then appeared on Broadway in a musical called Girl Crazy. Fred Astaire didn't do the choreography but he was hired to help out. This was how they met. Girl Crazy made Ginger Rogers a Broadway star. With the power of that success behind her, she signed a contract with Paramount, but then got out of it (I love all the contractual stuff - I've mentioned that before. I love to hear the business side of things) - and signed with RKO. It was under the auspices of RKO that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their many many films together. They were the biggest stars in the world. Those movies came at a time when America really needed them. And also - they were unlike the other musicals at the time ... those two completely revolutionized that tired genre (it was already tired!) and made it something new and fresh. Not to mention the cinematography ... If you watch the filming of those dance scenes, you can see that the camera glides and flows WITH the couple, at the same time that we always see both of them in the screen at the same time. I wish I wish I wish that musicals today would stop it with the jumpcuts and Flashdance-inspired fragmented filmmaking - and just let us see the dancing, dammit. Astaire said about Rogers: "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."

The thing I guess I didn't know about Ginger was that she was primarily an actress. After a decade of musicals, she made the unpopular decision to stop for a while and do straight drama. It paid off. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle. If you've seen the film (or any of her other straight dramas), you know how good she was. (And I'm sure De could speak to all of this far better than I could. She's probably the biggest Ginger Rogers fan that I know!)

Ginger Rogers was one of those people who was known, primarily, for one thing. She was extremely fortunate - and also had a magic about her that came out when dancing with Astaire that still is money in the bank. Like, you can cash in that check for centuries. Actresses dream of "hitting" something like that - not just being successful - but tapping into something "magic" ... and she did.

But my favorite stories in her chatty defensive funny book are about her struggles to either be taken seriously, or her lobbying for parts that nobody was thinking of her for, because of her reputation for being an actress for musicals.

Garson Kanin, in his chatty awesome book Hollywood tells the story of Ginger Rogers campaigning HARD to play Queen Elizabeth in John Ford's Mary of Scotland ... and it just really moves me, because she knew, in her heart, how good she would be, but she also knew she had to prove it. She was a gigantic star. Didn't matter. Not everybody can play everything. You have to PROVE it to the powers-that-be and proving it takes a lot of guts. Because, more often than not, you are facing a group of people who basically don't see you for the part, don't want you for the part ... it is an unwelcoming atmosphere from the get-go. I talked about this a bit when I mentioned Camryn Manheim's journey as an actress and how she had to SHOW the client that she could be a mechanic, even though they had it in their heads that they wanted a man for the part. Guts. It is my belief that those who become most successful are not necessarily the most talented - but those who do not CAVE in moments such as that. Those who do not CHOKE but "show up", 100%.

So although Ginger Rogers' book is chock-full of great stuff, I chose the excerpt that had to do with her trying to get the part of Queen Elizabeth, because THAT is why Ginger Rogers' career spanned 50 years, I am convinced. She didn't even GET the part. Doesn't matter in the slightest. It's the attitude I am talking about.

30 years later, Ginger Rogers said to Garson Kanin, "They should have given me that part. I would have been sensational."

I agree.

I've also included a clip below from Top Hat.

EXCERPT FROM Ginger: My Story, by Ginger Rogers

At a dinner party one evening, I cornered Pan Berman. "Pan," I said, "I know you're producing Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland and that Kate Hepburn is starring. I've also heard that John Ford is directing. Now, Pan, you have tested everybody under the sun but Shirley Temple or me for the role of Queen Elizabeth. Why not let me test for the role?"

"You?" interrupted Mr. Berman. "Why would you want to play the role of such an embittered woman?"

"Oh, come on, Pan, you know I want to get out of those soft chiffon dresses and play something that has some starch in it."

"Dear Ginger," he said, patiently patting me on the shoulder. "You should be glad you do what you do so well. Why don't you just stick to your high-heeled slippers and be happy?"

With that, he gently brushed me off with a smile.

With that, I determined to devise a plan.

I called Leland Hayward. "You're my agent, why don't you talk to Berman about my playing the role of Elizabeth? He won't listen to me."

"Why don't you corner John Ford?" suggested Leland. "Catch him at the commissary during lunch."

I rarely went into the commissary while filming - unless I had to be there for a conference; I preferred to have lunch in my dressing room. Since I wasn't filming, I decided to follow Leland's suggestion. I found out the day and time that the tests were to be made and I went into the commissary. As Ford and some of his camera crew were leaving, I went up to him and told him what I wanted. I knew if I showed up as Ginger Rogers, I wouldn't get to first base. However, if I appeared under a false name, all made up as Elizabeth, the test I made would be judged only on the basis of my performance. John Ford loved a practical joke, and the idea of fooling Pan Berman tickled his funny bone. "Sounds terrific. Call me at home and we'll figure it out."

I called Leland with the good news and told him I thought I should pretend to be British so I'd even have the right accent. Leland loved the idea, and we decided I would become "Lady Ainsley." Listen, if I was going to be British, I might as well go all the way and be an aristocrat! Leland called Pan and told him he had a visiting British actress who might be talked into taking the role.

I got in touch with Mel Berns in makeup and Edward Stevenson in wardrobe. They were both sworn to secrecy. A lot of painstaking detail went into this charade; among other things, I had to get a studio pass under my pseudonym, Lady Ainsley.

The day of the test, I wore clothes different from any I had been seen in before, donned a brunette wig, and put a turban around my head. At the studio, I didn't go through the automobile gate but headed for the Gower Street door. The Gower Street entrance was the first test of my disguise. Studio pass in hand and my British accent at the ready, it worked like a dream. I galloped to Mel Berns's chair and he went to work. First, a plastic skull cap was put over my head. It reached down to my eyebrows, and created the appearance of a very high forehead. Later, a faithfully designed eighteenth-century wig was put over the skull cap. The period makeup for Elizabethan times was a ghostly white, for men as well as women. You can't imagine how this white stuff changed my features. Mel gave my eyes a beady look by creating a narrowness around them and painted a slit-like mouth over my full lips. Eddie Stevenson found a period costume with the full regalia of queenly dress, including a huge stiff ruffle around my neck. If clothes make the woman, then I felt like the real Queen of England! As far as knowing that the queen was Ginger, I didn't think even Lelee would have recognized me.

Leland played his part well, too; he phoned John Ford and gave him the lowdown on my character. Lady Ainsley had been playing Shakespearean roles for the past five years on the London stage where her name was well known. While her husband, Lord Ainsley, was on safari in Africa hunting lions, Lady Ainsley had accepted an invitation from Mary Pickford to stay at Pickfair for a fortnight. Though she was uninterested in making an American movie, Lady Ainsley was persuaded to do the test as a lark. She was a great admirer of John Ford's films, and would enjoy meeting Katharine Hepburn.

John Ford ate it up. Leland then advised John to call Pan Berman and give him the story. "If he doesn't buy it, tell him to call me, and I'll convince him."

When the time came for me to test, I casually strolled onto the stage in this fantastic regalia and felt ten feet tall! Hiding behind character makeup was a new experience for me. Three other women in courtly costumes stood on the set waiting for the camera test. One of them was Anita Colby, a very good friend of my mother's and mine. Each of the ladies-in-waiting curtsied as the assistant director introduced them to "Lady Ainsley". Even Anita bowed; I could hardly wait to tell Lela. I moved off to the test stage and made a grand entrance. No one recognized me. The entire crew stepped aside deferentially, giving me a wide berth. The rumor was that Lady Ainsley was doing this test as a favor to John Ford. I had a ball fooling all the folks I'd worked with month after month. There's nothing Hollywood loves more than a bona fide title, and Lady Ainsley had one ... or so they believed.

John Ford came onto the set and went right to me. He played it straight but I could see the twinkle in his eye.

"Lady Ainsley, we have never met. However, I have seen you perform. I was in London eighteen months ago."

"Perhaps you saw me with Maurice Evans in As You Like It," I answered in my high-toned British accent.

"Yes, that must be it. My, that's wonderful makeup you're wearing. No one could possibly recognize you," he said audibly, and then, lowering his voice so only I could hear, whispered, "I had to tell Hepburn who you are. She'd kill me if she found out later, and I've got to make this film with her."

Katharine Hepburn came onto the stage dressed in her Mary costume. "Miss Hepburn, this is Lady Ainsley," announced the director. Kate looked at me as one does at an adversary.

"Hello," she managed. Kate looked at me again with an indescribably expression.

John placed us for the test and gave the signal, "All right. Camera, action. Don't just sit there. Talk to each other."

We were seated in high-backed oak chairs and a large mahogany table stood in front of us. I turned to Kate, and in my best British accent I said, "I've enjoyed watching your performances very much, Miss Hepburn."

Although everything looked normal above the table, below decks Kate swung her leg back and kicked me in the shins. Her expression was unchanged as she muttered in a stage whisper, "You 0#%&*$!! Who do you think you're fooling?"

I was surprised by her outburst and looked to see if the sound boom was in place. If her remarks had been recorded, that would spoil the whole deal. Luckily, it was a silent test. I bit my tongue to keep from answering back. My composure was slipping, but somehow I managed to offer another weak-tea type compliment. Her look was that of the cat ready to pounce on the canary, and I was the canary. History was reversing itself. "Mary" was going to behead "Elizabeth"!

Ford broke the spell. "Look to the left, then turn to the right. Just keep talking to each other." I moved my mouth as though speaking, as Kate continued to glare at me.

"Thank you, Lady Ainsley," said Ford. "As soon as the other tests are over, I'll come into your dressing room."

I got up slowly from my chair, and turned to Kate. "Thank you, Miss Hepburn," I said through clenched teeth. "Thank you very much."

As I headed for the portable dressing room, I ran smack into my old buddy Eddie Rubin. Eddie wasn't in on this ruse as he hadn't been around when this idea was hatched. He looked right at me as if I was a stranger and let me pass. I waited for the bomb to explode over my disguise. But nothing happened until John Ford burst into the room and said in a loud voice, "Lady Ainsley, thank you so much for your time and trouble. I knew we interrupted your holiday, but in a day or two, we'll get back to you. Leland Hayward is representing you - correct?"

"Yes, that's right, Mr. Ford."

"Good. I will speak with Leland after we see the test. Your Shakespearean ability is known to us, but we needed to see how you photographed opposite Miss Hepburn. Mr. Berman and I will be seeing this footage sometime late tomorrow afternoon. Thank you again." And he disappeared.

I returned to my dressing room, got out of the Renaissance clothing, and then went over to Mel Burns to get the makeup removed. I slipped out of the studio without being detected, and when I reached home, I called Leland to describe the events. He roared at hearing how Kate had kicked me.

A couple of days later Leland called and told me Pan had seen the tests and liked them. Now he wanted them reshot in sound. My ruse was really snowballing!

Alas, someone leaked the story, and the next day Louella Parsons's column was devoted to the Lady Ainsley incident. Lolly sharply criticized me for spending the company's money on a practical joke. Louella loved to give me the "raspberry" whenever she could. Hedda Hopper, on the other hand, seemed to like me, and I liked her. I think this was because she secretly thanked Lelee for not accepting a job offer with the Los Angeles Times. They then offered it to Hedda - and the rest is history. But Louella was another story. Unfortunately, I was not Carole Lombard, who could get away with anything. Louella called it a "practical joke", but in my heart, it was serious. I wanted that part so much I could taste it. And I had no other way of getting a test for the role.

I raced to the telephone to call Berman's house, and spoke with his wife, Vi. She told me Pan had not seen the morning paper because he had gone to the races at Santa Anita early that morning. Shortly thereafter, a friend called and asked me to the races ... at Santa Anita. To go or not to go, that was my dilemma. What if I ran into Berman? I decided to take the risk of bumping into him. With twelve thousand people at the races, that wasn't very likely.

So far, so good! I was standing near the betting window with my friend when I heard a familiar voice behind me. "You little devil! You know, young lady, you really had me going." I turned to face Pan Berman. "That was the best trick ever pulled on me. I had no idea that you were that 'lady' I saw on the screen. I never would have guessed it was you!"

I laughed and suggested that I do a second test. To his great credit, Pan Berman wasn't the least bit angry. His sense of humor about this was far better than anyone could have expected. But I didn't get the second test and I didn't get the part. The role of Elizabeth was given to Florence Eldridge. Maybe it was just as well, because the film wasn't favorably reviewed by the public. And if I had played the role of Elizabeth, both the studio and the public would probably have laid their complaints at my door!

The Books: "'Tis Herself: A Memoir" (Maureen O'Hara)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

'Tis Herself: A Memoir, by Maureen O'Hara (with John Nicoletti)

Maureen O'Hara was one of those "old" movie stars that I grew up knowing about because of the yearly showing of Miracle on 34th Street on television, as well as my absolute obsession with Parent Trap. God, how I loved that movie. I wanted to be in it, I wanted to live it, I wanted to go to that camp, I wanted a British accent, and I wanted to wear little yellow sunsuits. Maureen O'Hara, with her flaming red hair and SLAMMING body (so soft and voluptuous in the early 50s - in Parent Trap transformed into a veritable zigzag of curves accentuated by bullet bras that would put your eye out), was so much fun in that movie, and I, as a little kid watching it on TV, thought: "Oh, it is so OBVIOUS that she still loves her husband!!" I liked her temper tantrums, her sort of self-righteous attitude - because it was so obvious that underneath it she was as soft and vulnerable as anyone. That was, unbeknownst to me at the time, the major element of O'Hara's appeal (well, that and the red hair, green eyes, and slamming body): the temper-y hothead, untameable, a shrew, a wild lion ... but what all of that is hiding is a soft womanly heart. If you could tap into it, and access it, you'd be the luckiest man alive. The other reason she was an actress who was familiar to me was because of, of course, The Quiet Man. Beloved by many, but beloved in particular by Irish Americans (as evidenced by my conversation with Eamonn at the Ice Bar in Dublin). When I saw ET, I felt like the smartest person in the world because I recognized that clip of the kiss in the wind from Quiet Man: that wasn't just some old movie, it was a movie I knew by heart! I loved one of my father's comments about Quiet Man, and he said this, oh, 20 years ago, but for some reason I remember the jist of it perfectly: "It has the best fight scene I've ever seen, and when I first saw it I really thought it was about 20 minutes long. It involves the whole town and goes over the fields ... and when every time I see it, it feels like the fight scene gets shorter and shorter. But I still remember the first time I saw it and I couldn't believe how long that fight scene was!" I am sure you all know the fight scene I mean. It makes me laugh just thinking about it.

In the years to come, I would watch many more of Maureen O'Hara's pictures - filling in all of the many blanks (she made 5 films with John Ford - and a bunch with John Wayne - she has said, "He [Wayne] was my best friend for 40 years.") - and had her struggles with Hollywood, like most successful actresses did. She felt she was not considered for really dramatic parts, and that they were trying to pigeonhole her. Of course that was true - and her role in The Quiet Man is the ultimate pigeonhole - fiery untamed Irish lassie - but she found a way to work the system, and be okay with it. She really was a "fiery" woman. I love the stories about her battles with John Ford - who, obviously, felt very strongly about his own Irish-ness.

O'Hara would sashay onto the set, and they'd basically do "Irish schtick" together, for the crew - and it was Ford's way of asserting, "I'M IRISH, I'M IRISH, LOOK HOW IRISH I AM, I CAN GO TOE TO TOE WITH MAUREEN" - and O'Hara knew that that was what he was doing, and that was what was expected of her - but at the same time, when he pissed her off she would let him have it. A fascinating relationship.

But she was one of those people who fought to hold her ground, who did contractual battles, and battles with studio execs - she wasn't a cringing violet, who felt lucky to just be working. For example, when she signed on to do Parent Trap, it was in her contract that she would have top billing. She was the leading lady of the picture and a huge star. When she eventually saw the poster, it said:

O'Hara went ballistic. She knew that Walt Disney had decided to ignore her contract and promote Hayley in the double role (basically calling attention to the revolutionary split-screen filming that they had done to make her appear as twins). O'Hara complained - and it started moving up the chain of command - 'take it to this person', 'take it to SAG' ... and to actually take on Disney was not (then or now) a pleasing prospect. Is this the hill you want to die on? O'Hara never worked for Disney again. Which is a shame, because I think she was the perfect Disney leading lady. But that was who she was. Do NOT take advantage of her, and more than that: don't betray her. That ad campaign for Parent Trap put Disney in breach of Maureen's contract - but they obviously knew that they held all the cards and whatever fight she wanted, she would not win.

Her autobiography is full of great anecdotes like that. She was a canny businesswoman - protective of herself and her interests ... and eager to show all that she could do, even if Hollywood wanted to pin her down. Her stories of battling the studios (and hell, I love crap like that - I love the stories of Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe - and all of those people who really stood up for themselves in that environment) are fasciating - a real glimpse into a world that no longer exists, but with much relevance to young actresses today.

Maureen O'Hara was born into an eccentric arts-loving family who lived in Ranelagh, a suburb on the outskirts of Dublin. (My last trip to Dublin I stayed in Ranelagh.) Her mother also was a crazy redhead, and O'Hara grew up surrounded by jokes, laughter - an Irish cliche, basically. But she remembers it all as warm, beautiful, and joyous - a wonderful beginning for life. Her parents were into opera, football, fashion (her mother was, apparently, a clotheshorse - and brought the young Maureen shopping with her) - her mother was also an actress and a singer. Maureen knew quite early that acting was what she wanted to do - and she got some jobs on the radio, and what amounts to summer stock - she was only 13, 14 years old ... but finally, she got serious enough to begin studying for real. At 14, she auditioned for the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and was accepted - it was there that she really began to learn how to be an actress. Things were on fast-forward for her, when you read about it. Everything seems to proceed in a logical fashion. Of course she would be approrached to do a screen test. Of course she would resist at first - what about being a stage actress? Then of course she would come to her senses and go to London for the screen test. And of course Charles Laughton would see the screentest and be struck dumb by her eyes, he was so struck by her that he put her under his own personal contract. And the rest is history. Maureen O'Hara was one of the most successful stage actresses in Ireland (winning prizes left and right) by the time she was 15 years old, and when she went to Hollywood, under the wing of Charles Laughton, started off playing leads. Pretty incredible. No working her way up the ladder. Her book details that journey in humorous prose. You really like her. She seems very personable, with a temper you admire, and a seriousness about the work that is undeniable. Her desire to be a good actress is supreme.

She was an actress MADE for the invention of Technicolor. She's a gorgeous woman, even in black and white ... but what sets her apart from other gorgeous women? Her coloring. The red hair, pale skin, and green eyes ... It's almost like Technicolor was developed FOR her. That first glimpse of her in Quiet Man depends on the colors.

Maureen O'Hara retired from acting in the70s and in many way her post-acting career has almost been more interesting. She married a pilot - Charles Blair- who was killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a long history with Pan Am, and in his wake, she managed his company - Antilles Airboats, traveling the world, promoting the excitement and possibilities of aviation. She eventually became President and CEO of the company (the first female CEO of an airline) - and lives, to this day, down in the Virgin Islands. She is one of those go-to gals for aviation fanatics around the world, because of the history she has seen in that industry. She supports and promotes aviation museums, the restoration of air boats and other classic aircraft, and the keeping of that history. She donated her husband's Sikorsky VS-44A plane (nicknamed "Queen of the Skies") to the New England Air Museum - and a friend of mine who is a freak about all things aviation gave me a postcard of the plane which is on my bulletin board. A Spruce Goose, indeed. She's done a couple of films in the 90s - coming out of retirement - and she is a very old woman now. Almost 90. She maintains her connections with all the different worlds she inhabited - Irish, filmmaking, aviation ... a truly interesting woman.

Oh, and let's not forget the groundbreaking moment when O'Hara became an American citizen (while maintaining her Irish citizenship) in 1946 and she put up a stink about being referred to as a "British subject":

There must have been a thousand questions on their standard questionnaire. After I completed it, I went and took the exam. I must have passed because I was then sent before a woman, ann officer of the court, who instructed me to raise my right hand and forswear my allegiance to Great Britian. FULL STOP!

Forswear my allegiance to Britain? I didn't know what she was talking about. I told her, "Miss, I'm very sorry, but I cannot forswear an allegiance that I do not have. I am Irish and my allegiance is to Ireland." She looked at me with consternation for a moment and then said, "Well, then you better read these papers." She handed me back the stack of papers I had filled out before my exam. I perused them and was stunned to see that on every page where I had written "Irish" as my former nationality, they had crossed it out with a pen and written "English".

I told the woman, "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't accept this. It's impossible for me to do. I am Irish. I was born in Ireland and will only do this if I am referred to as an Irish citizen." She seemed perturbed that I would break the routine of the allegiance ceremony, and said, "I can't do that. You'll have to go to court to obtain the order for me to do it."

"Fine," I said. "When shall I go back to court?" I didn't have to come back. I did it right then and was taken straight to the courtroom. No attorneys were allowed in the courtroom with me, only my two witnesses. I stood in front of the judge, whose name I can't remember, and listened as the clerk explained why I was there before the court. Then I told the judge, "I am Irish. I will not forswear allegiance to Great Britain because I owe no allegiance to Great Britain. I was born in Dublin, Ireland."

The judge and I then went into a very long discussion of all of Irish history. He challenged my assertions. We kept going over it and over it, back and forth, but I wouldn't give an inch. I couldn't. Finally he said, "We're going to have to find out what Washington thinks." He instructed the clerk, "Check Washington and see what they consider a person like Miss O'Hara." The clerk left the courtroom and returned shortly after that. He told the judge, "Washington says she is a British subject." I was furious and told the judge, "I am not responsible for your antiquated records in Washington, D.C." He promptly ruled against me.

I had no choice but to thank him and tell the court, "Under those circumstances, I cannot accept nor do I want to become an American citizen." I turned to walk out of that courtroom, but having the kind of personality that I do, thought I couldn't give up without taking one last crack at him. I was halfway out of the courtroom when I turned back to him and said, "Your Honor, have you thought for one moment about what you are trying to force upon and take away from my child and my unborn children and my unborn grandchildren?" He sat back and listened intently as I went on, "You are trying to take away from them their right to boast and brag about their wonderful and famous Irish mother and grandmother. I just can't accept that."

He'd had enough. The judge threw his hands up and explained, "Get this woman out of here! Give her anything on her papers that she wants, but get her out of here!" The clerk moved in my direction and I simply said, "Thank you, Your Honor."

I didn't know at that time that my certificate of naturalization had already been created, and that they had listed my former nationality as English. Sometime between that date and the date when I was called to be sworn in as an American citizen, they changed my certificate in accordance with the order of the court. Where my former nationality was printed, they had erased "English" and typed over it "Irish". On the back of this document it states that "the erasure made on this certificate as to Former Nationality 'Irish' was made before issuance, to conform to petition. Name changed by order of the court." It is signed by the U.S. District Court.

This was the first time in the history of the United States of America that the American government recognized an Irish person as being Irish. It was one hell of a victory for me because otherwise I would have had to turn down my American citizenship. I could not have accepted it with my former nationality being anything other than Irish, because no other nationality in the world was my own.

A scandal arose in the wake of this, when incorrect reports came out that she had challenged the court during the ceremony in which the oath of allegiance was taken. Judges across the land wrote terrible things about Miss O'Hara, and the federal judge who had presided over that particular allegiance ceremony said that Miss O'Hara was a liar, and that the incident never happened.

He was correct that the event did not happen in his courtroom, but very wrong that it didn't happen at all.

The implications of the decision to list Maureen O'Hara as "Irish" were widespread - and crossed the Atlantic. O'Hara writes:

Apparently, the Irish government was unaware that its citizens were being classified as subjects of Great Britain. On January 29, Prime Minister Eamon De Valera issued the following statement:

We are today an independent republic. We acknowledge no sovereignty except that of our own people. A fact that our attitude during the recent war should have amply demonstrated. Miss O'Hara was right when she asserted she owed no allegiance to Britain and therefore had none which she could renounce.

The prime minister then dispatched his envoys to Washington, D.C., where the Republic of Ireland formally requested that this policy be changed. The policy was changed, and my stand had paved the way for every Irish immigrant to the United States, including my own brothers and sisters, to be legally recognized as Irish from that day forward.

Pretty amazing.

Her autobiography (written with a little bit of help) is lovely. It came out in 2004, which is exciting - because what a long life she has lived! What scope - so you can really get a sense of it in her book. You can hear her voice. There are times when it seems she is leaning towards you, the reader, to whisper a secret. It is not a distant voice, or a cold voice. It's chatty and argumentative (still - I love that - she's like, "I know that everyone SAID I had an affair with John Ford, but I am here to tell you I did not, and all of you boys are barking up the wrong tree." You tell 'em, Maureen!) - charming, passionate, logical, and funny.

I highly recommend it. I recommend it for aviation fans, too. Some good anecdotes here about Howard Hughes, not to mention her later years when she devoted her life to aviation.

The excerpt I chose today just HAD to be about The Quiet Man because you know what? I can't resist.

Watch her smarts as an actress here, in the following excerpt. Not just smart about acting, but smart about script analysis: how she knew what the most important scene in the picture was, and if she nailed THAT, the rest of the picture would flow. That's important - an important mark of a good actress - to not just be worried about her closeups, and her crying scenes - but about the STORY being told. Watch how she goes back to the source material, to look for clues on how to play that scene. Love that.

I also love her version of the famous "whisper" at the end of Quiet Man - what did she whisper? (I wrote about that moment here). In the last shot, the two of them stand together, waving out at the road, laughing, beautiful - and she leans over and whispers something to him. Watch Wayne's reaction. Ha!!! The whisper obviously gets a rise (literally) out of Wayne because in response he chases her back to the house, and, presumably, to bed at the end of the picture. What did she say??

EXCERPT FROM 'Tis Herself: A Memoir, by Maureen O'Hara (with John Nicoletti)

The single day that it did rai was just when Mr. Ford needed it. Right after the scene where Duke and I kiss in the windy cottage and I hit him, there is the sequence in which I run from the cottage, cross a stream, and then fall as the rain and wind storm about me. That was real rain in the scene. The rest of the rain in the picture came from rain machines. The wind actually blew me down in that scene, but I kept going because Mr. Ford always made it clear to his actors that "You do not stop acting no matter what happens in a scene until I say cut. I am the director,"

I loved Mary Kate Danaher. I loved the hell and fire in her. She was a terrific dame, tough, and didn't let herself get walked on. As I readied to begin playing her, I believed that my most important scene in the picture, the one that I had to get just right, was when Mary Kate is in the field herding the sheep and Sean Thornton sees her for the very first time. There is no dialogue between them. It's a moment captured in time, and it's love at first sight. I felt very strongly that if the audience believed it was love at first sight, then we would have lightning in a bottle. But if they didn't, we would have just another lovely romantic comedy on our hands. It had to be perfect, and the script provided me with a little inspiration, but not enough. Sean's line to Michaeleen - "Hey, is that real? She couldn't be" - didn't quite give me what I needed. I found a passage in Walsh's story that hit the mark, and I used it as motivation for how I would play the scene:

And there leaning on a wall was the woman. No ghost woman. Flesh and blood or I have no eyes to see. The sun shining o nher red hair and her scarf green as grass on her shoulders. She was not looking at me. She was looking over my head on the far side of the pool. I only saw her over my shoulder but she was fit to sit with the Mona Lisa amongst the rocks. More beautiful by fire and no less wicked. A woman I never saw before, yet a woman strangely familiar.

The scene comes off so beautifully. Mr. Ford brilliantly kept the camera stationary and had me walk slowly down and out of the frame instead of following me as I walked away. It's one of my favorite shots in the movie, and, if you have never noticed it before, it's worth watching the movie again just to see it.

Of course, the scene that everyone always asks me about is the scene with Duke and me in the cemetery. Most of the Quiet Maniacs, those who keep the film in its cult-classic status, tell me that this is their favorite scene. It's the sequence on the bicycle when Sean and Mary Kate escape Michaeleen's watchful eye. We run into the cemetery and it begins to rain. As thunder chases me under the arch, Duke takes his coat off and wraps it around me to keep me dry and warm. The rain drenches us and his white shirt clings to his body and becomes translucent. In that moment, we are truly together in each other's arms, and we kiss. It is sensual, passionate, and more than any other scene we ever did together displays the on-screen eroticism of the Wayne and O'Hara combination.

There were two parts to that scene. The first part we had to get in one take or Mr. Ford would have strung us up by our toes. It's everything that happens right up to the embrace and kiss. We had to get it in one take because our clothes were sopping wet when we finished. If we missed it, then our costumes would have to be cleaned, dried, and ironed. Our hair would have to be washed, dried, and reset. Makeup would have to be reapplied. These things take hours and hours and cost thousands and thousands of dollars for each take. We got it in one.

Once we were drenched and part one was in the can, we could focus on the kiss. But Mr. Ford rarely allowed more than a couple of takes, and I think we got that one in two. Why is the scene so erotic? Why were Duke and I so electric in our love scenes together? I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne. Duke's presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal hell and fire, it was exciting and thrilling. Other actresses looked as though they would cower and break if Duke raised a hand or even hollered. Not me. I always gave as good as I got, and it was believable. So during those moments of tenderness, when the lovemaking was about to begin, audiences saw for a half second that he had finally tamed me - but only for that half second.

Mr. Ford did not make Duke perform the kiss over and over, as I've read. The suggestion has been that Mr. Ford was living, through Duke, the experience of kissing me. Not in this scene, although I do believe John Ford longed to be every hero he ever brought to the screen. He would have loved to live every role John Wayne ever played. He would have loved to be Sean Thornton. His vivid stories - of riding with Pancho Villa or his longing to be a great naval hero or an Irish rebel - were all fantasies of being men John Ford could never be in life, yet desperately wanted and needed to be. He was a real-life Walter Mitty, years before Thurber gave Mitty literary life.

Visually, there are so many magnificent sequences in the film, like the windy kiss in White O'Morn when Mary Kate is caught cleaning the cottage. That scene was shot in Hollywood, and Mr. Ford used two large wind machines to blow our clothes and my hair for the effect. These were two large airplane propellers on a stand that Mr. Ford controlled by sending hand signals to an operator. Once again, it was a scene tailor-made for Duke and me. He pulls me away from the door and kisses me as I struggle to break free. He tames me for that half second, and I kiss him back, but then follow up with a hard blow across the face for the offense.

Now let me tell you what really happened with that slap. That day on the set, I was mad as hell at Duke and Mr. Ford for something they had done earlier in the day. My plan was to sock Duke in the jaw and rally let him have it. But Duke was no fool, and he saw it coming, he saw it in my face. So he put his hand up to shield his chin, and my hand hit the top of his fingers and snapped back. My plan backfired and my hand hurt like hell. I knew I had really hurt it and tried to hide it in the red petticoat I was wearing. Duke came over and said, "Let me see that hand. You nearly broke my jaw." He lifted it out of hiding; each one of my fingers had blown up like a sausage. I was taken off the set and sent to the local hospital where it was X-rayed. I had a hairline fracture in one of the bones in my wrist, but in the end got no sympathy. I was taken back to the set and put to work.

While one is working on a motion picture, it's natural to get mad at the others from time to time. I almost found myself in John Ford's barrel while we were shooting the Innisfree horse-race sequence down on the beach. The scene again required the use of wind machines during one of my close-ups. But instead of the wind machine blowing my hair away from my face, Mr. Ford put the machine behind me and blew my hair forward. Well, at that time I had hair like wire. It snapped and snapped against my face. The wind was blowing my hair forward and the hair was lashing my eyeballs. It hurt, and I kept blinking. Mr. Ford started yelling at me and insulting me under his breath: "Keep your goddamn eyes open. Why can't you get it right?"

He kept yelling at me and I was getting madder and madder. I finally blew my lid. I put my two hands down the side of the cart and yelled, "What would a baldheaded old son of a bitch like you know about hair lashing across your eyeballs?"

The words had no sooner left my mouth than I was nearly knocked off my feet by the sound of a collective gasp on the set. No one spoke to John Ford that way. There was absolute silence. No one dared move, speak, or even breathe. I don't know why I did it. He made me mad and I just blew my stack. Immediately, I thought, Oh my God. Why didn't I keep my bloody mouth shut? He's going to throw me off the picture. After years of waiting to make The Quiet Man, I was sure I was about to be tossed off the set. I waited for the explosion. I waited without moving a muscle and watched as Mr. Ford cased the entire set with his eyes. He looked at every person - every actor, every crew member, every stuntman - and he did it fast as lightning. I could see the wheels in his head turning. The old man was deciding whether he was going to kill me or laugh and let me off the hook. I didn't know which way it would go until the very moment that he broke into laughter. Everyone on the set collapsed with relief and finally exhaled. They followed Mr. Ford's lead and laughed for ten minutes - out of sheer relief that I was safe. Then we went on and shot the scene.

But in the end the old man got the last laugh. He and Duke agreed to play a joke on me. To do it, they chose the sequence where Duke drags me across town and through the fields. I bet you didn't know that sheep dung has the worst odor you have ever smelled in your life. Well, it does. Mr. Ford and Duke kicked all of the sheep dung they could find onto the hill where I was to be dragged, facedown, on my stomach. Of course, I saw them doing it, and so when they kicked the dung onto the field, Faye, Jimmy, and I kicked it right back off. They'd kick it in, and we'd kick it out. It went on and on, and finally, right before the scene was shot, they won, getting in the last kick. There was no way to kick it out. The camera began to roll and Duke had the time of his life dragging me through it. It was bloody awful. After the scene was over, Mr. Ford had given instructions that I was not to be brought a bucket of water or a towel. He made me keep it on for the rest of the day. I was mad as hell, but I had to laugh too. Isn't showbiz glamorous?

And the sequence itself is perfect for Duke and me. I fight him the entire way, but he won't have it. I swing at him, so he kicks me in the rear. In the end, he tosses me at the feet of Red Will and wins my dowry, and I concede. But the audience knows that he only thinks he has tamed me for good.

One thing I have always loved about John Ford pictures is that they are full of music. Whether it's the Sons of the Pioneers or the Welsh Singers, you know that eventually someone is going to sing in the movie. I was thrilled on The Quiet Man because it was finally my turn. I sang "Young May Moon" in the scene with Barry Fitzgerald, and, of course, "The Isle of Innisfree". I first heard that melody when played by Victor Young at John Ford's home in 1950, and I thought it was beautiful. When we returned from Ireland, John Ford, Charlie Fitz, and I wrote the words that I sang in the movie.

We finished filming in Ireland in early July, and returned to Hollywood to complete the interiors. Half the picture was shot there. Naturally, some of the "Irish Players" had to come back with us, and I was blessed that Charlie and JImmy were among them. I now had my two brothers living with me in America. The interiors were completed at the end of August, and Mr. Ford went right to work editing his movie. When I went in to see the film at Argosy, Duke was there, having just seen it. I walked into the office and he ran over to me, picked me up, and spun me around. He said, "It's wonderful, and you're wonderful." But Herbert Yates of Republic had a different reaction. He wanted The Quiet Man to be no more than a certain length. Ford's version was more than a few minutes over that, and Yates told him to cut the picture further.

But Ford was far too smart for him. When The Quiet Man was previewed to distributors and theater operators at Republic, Mr. Ford instructed the projection operator to stop the projector at the precise length that Yates had requested. Of course, Ford hadn't cut the film at all, and so the screen went black right in the middle of the fight-sequence finale. The audience went wild and demanded that the projector be turned back on. Mr. Ford cued the operator and the fight sequence continued. The audience rose to their feet and cheered when it was over. Old Man Yates wasn't about to touch it after that, and Mr. Ford was allowed to keep his extra ominutes.

There is only one fitting way to end our discussion of The Quiet Man, and that's with a whisper. No matter what part of the world I'm in, the question I am always asked is: "What did you whisper into John Wayne's ear at the end of The Quiet Man?" It was John Ford's idea: it was the ending he wanted. I was told by Mr. Ford exactly what I was to say. At first I refused. I said, "No. I can't. I can't ay that to Duke." But Mr. Ford wanted a very shocked reaction from Duke, and he said, "I'm telling you, you are to say it." I had no choice, and so I agreed, but with a catch: "I'll say it on one condition - that it is never ever repeated or revealed to anyone." So we made a deal. After the scene was over, we told Duke about our agreement and three of us made a pact. There are those who claim that they were told and know what I said. They don't and are lying. John Ford took it to his grave - so did Duke - and the answer will die with me. Curiosity about the whisper has become a great part of the Quiet Man legend. I have no doubt that as long as the film endures, so will the speculation. The Quiet Man meant so much to John Ford, John Wayne, and myself. I know it was their favorite picture too. It bonded us as artists and friends in a way that happens but once in a career. That little piece of The Quiet Man belongs to just us, and so I hope you'll understand as I answer:

The Books: "'Tis Herself: A Memoir" (Maureen O'Hara)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

'Tis Herself: A Memoir, by Maureen O'Hara (with John Nicoletti)

Maureen O'Hara was one of those "old" movie stars that I grew up knowing about because of the yearly showing of Miracle on 34th Street on television, as well as my absolute obsession with Parent Trap. God, how I loved that movie. I wanted to be in it, I wanted to live it, I wanted to go to that camp, I wanted a British accent, and I wanted to wear little yellow sunsuits. Maureen O'Hara, with her flaming red hair and SLAMMING body (so soft and voluptuous in the early 50s - in Parent Trap transformed into a veritable zigzag of curves accentuated by bullet bras that would put your eye out), was so much fun in that movie, and I, as a little kid watching it on TV, thought: "Oh, it is so OBVIOUS that she still loves her husband!!" I liked her temper tantrums, her sort of self-righteous attitude - because it was so obvious that underneath it she was as soft and vulnerable as anyone. That was, unbeknownst to me at the time, the major element of O'Hara's appeal (well, that and the red hair, green eyes, and slamming body): the temper-y hothead, untameable, a shrew, a wild lion ... but what all of that is hiding is a soft womanly heart. If you could tap into it, and access it, you'd be the luckiest man alive. The other reason she was an actress who was familiar to me was because of, of course, The Quiet Man. Beloved by many, but beloved in particular by Irish Americans (as evidenced by my conversation with Eamonn at the Ice Bar in Dublin). When I saw ET, I felt like the smartest person in the world because I recognized that clip of the kiss in the wind from Quiet Man: that wasn't just some old movie, it was a movie I knew by heart! I loved one of my father's comments about Quiet Man, and he said this, oh, 20 years ago, but for some reason I remember the jist of it perfectly: "It has the best fight scene I've ever seen, and when I first saw it I really thought it was about 20 minutes long. It involves the whole town and goes over the fields ... and when every time I see it, it feels like the fight scene gets shorter and shorter. But I still remember the first time I saw it and I couldn't believe how long that fight scene was!" I am sure you all know the fight scene I mean. It makes me laugh just thinking about it.

In the years to come, I would watch many more of Maureen O'Hara's pictures - filling in all of the many blanks (she made 5 films with John Ford - and a bunch with John Wayne - she has said, "He [Wayne] was my best friend for 40 years.") - and had her struggles with Hollywood, like most successful actresses did. She felt she was not considered for really dramatic parts, and that they were trying to pigeonhole her. Of course that was true - and her role in The Quiet Man is the ultimate pigeonhole - fiery untamed Irish lassie - but she found a way to work the system, and be okay with it. She really was a "fiery" woman. I love the stories about her battles with John Ford - who, obviously, felt very strongly about his own Irish-ness.

O'Hara would sashay onto the set, and they'd basically do "Irish schtick" together, for the crew - and it was Ford's way of asserting, "I'M IRISH, I'M IRISH, LOOK HOW IRISH I AM, I CAN GO TOE TO TOE WITH MAUREEN" - and O'Hara knew that that was what he was doing, and that was what was expected of her - but at the same time, when he pissed her off she would let him have it. A fascinating relationship.

But she was one of those people who fought to hold her ground, who did contractual battles, and battles with studio execs - she wasn't a cringing violet, who felt lucky to just be working. For example, when she signed on to do Parent Trap, it was in her contract that she would have top billing. She was the leading lady of the picture and a huge star. When she eventually saw the poster, it said:

O'Hara went ballistic. She knew that Walt Disney had decided to ignore her contract and promote Hayley in the double role (basically calling attention to the revolutionary split-screen filming that they had done to make her appear as twins). O'Hara complained - and it started moving up the chain of command - 'take it to this person', 'take it to SAG' ... and to actually take on Disney was not (then or now) a pleasing prospect. Is this the hill you want to die on? O'Hara never worked for Disney again. Which is a shame, because I think she was the perfect Disney leading lady. But that was who she was. Do NOT take advantage of her, and more than that: don't betray her. That ad campaign for Parent Trap put Disney in breach of Maureen's contract - but they obviously knew that they held all the cards and whatever fight she wanted, she would not win.

Her autobiography is full of great anecdotes like that. She was a canny businesswoman - protective of herself and her interests ... and eager to show all that she could do, even if Hollywood wanted to pin her down. Her stories of battling the studios (and hell, I love crap like that - I love the stories of Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe - and all of those people who really stood up for themselves in that environment) are fasciating - a real glimpse into a world that no longer exists, but with much relevance to young actresses today.

Maureen O'Hara was born into an eccentric arts-loving family who lived in Ranelagh, a suburb on the outskirts of Dublin. (My last trip to Dublin I stayed in Ranelagh.) Her mother also was a crazy redhead, and O'Hara grew up surrounded by jokes, laughter - an Irish cliche, basically. But she remembers it all as warm, beautiful, and joyous - a wonderful beginning for life. Her parents were into opera, football, fashion (her mother was, apparently, a clotheshorse - and brought the young Maureen shopping with her) - her mother was also an actress and a singer. Maureen knew quite early that acting was what she wanted to do - and she got some jobs on the radio, and what amounts to summer stock - she was only 13, 14 years old ... but finally, she got serious enough to begin studying for real. At 14, she auditioned for the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and was accepted - it was there that she really began to learn how to be an actress. Things were on fast-forward for her, when you read about it. Everything seems to proceed in a logical fashion. Of course she would be approrached to do a screen test. Of course she would resist at first - what about being a stage actress? Then of course she would come to her senses and go to London for the screen test. And of course Charles Laughton would see the screentest and be struck dumb by her eyes, he was so struck by her that he put her under his own personal contract. And the rest is history. Maureen O'Hara was one of the most successful stage actresses in Ireland (winning prizes left and right) by the time she was 15 years old, and when she went to Hollywood, under the wing of Charles Laughton, started off playing leads. Pretty incredible. No working her way up the ladder. Her book details that journey in humorous prose. You really like her. She seems very personable, with a temper you admire, and a seriousness about the work that is undeniable. Her desire to be a good actress is supreme.

She was an actress MADE for the invention of Technicolor. She's a gorgeous woman, even in black and white ... but what sets her apart from other gorgeous women? Her coloring. The red hair, pale skin, and green eyes ... It's almost like Technicolor was developed FOR her. That first glimpse of her in Quiet Man depends on the colors.

Maureen O'Hara retired from acting in the70s and in many way her post-acting career has almost been more interesting. She married a pilot - Charles Blair- who was killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a long history with Pan Am, and in his wake, she managed his company - Antilles Airboats, traveling the world, promoting the excitement and possibilities of aviation. She eventually became President and CEO of the company (the first female CEO of an airline) - and lives, to this day, down in the Virgin Islands. She is one of those go-to gals for aviation fanatics around the world, because of the history she has seen in that industry. She supports and promotes aviation museums, the restoration of air boats and other classic aircraft, and the keeping of that history. She donated her husband's Sikorsky VS-44A plane (nicknamed "Queen of the Skies") to the New England Air Museum - and a friend of mine who is a freak about all things aviation gave me a postcard of the plane which is on my bulletin board. A Spruce Goose, indeed. She's done a couple of films in the 90s - coming out of retirement - and she is a very old woman now. Almost 90. She maintains her connections with all the different worlds she inhabited - Irish, filmmaking, aviation ... a truly interesting woman.

Oh, and let's not forget the groundbreaking moment when O'Hara became an American citizen (while maintaining her Irish citizenship) in 1946 and she put up a stink about being referred to as a "British subject":

There must have been a thousand questions on their standard questionnaire. After I completed it, I went and took the exam. I must have passed because I was then sent before a woman, ann officer of the court, who instructed me to raise my right hand and forswear my allegiance to Great Britian. FULL STOP!

Forswear my allegiance to Britain? I didn't know what she was talking about. I told her, "Miss, I'm very sorry, but I cannot forswear an allegiance that I do not have. I am Irish and my allegiance is to Ireland." She looked at me with consternation for a moment and then said, "Well, then you better read these papers." She handed me back the stack of papers I had filled out before my exam. I perused them and was stunned to see that on every page where I had written "Irish" as my former nationality, they had crossed it out with a pen and written "English".

I told the woman, "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't accept this. It's impossible for me to do. I am Irish. I was born in Ireland and will only do this if I am referred to as an Irish citizen." She seemed perturbed that I would break the routine of the allegiance ceremony, and said, "I can't do that. You'll have to go to court to obtain the order for me to do it."

"Fine," I said. "When shall I go back to court?" I didn't have to come back. I did it right then and was taken straight to the courtroom. No attorneys were allowed in the courtroom with me, only my two witnesses. I stood in front of the judge, whose name I can't remember, and listened as the clerk explained why I was there before the court. Then I told the judge, "I am Irish. I will not forswear allegiance to Great Britain because I owe no allegiance to Great Britain. I was born in Dublin, Ireland."

The judge and I then went into a very long discussion of all of Irish history. He challenged my assertions. We kept going over it and over it, back and forth, but I wouldn't give an inch. I couldn't. Finally he said, "We're going to have to find out what Washington thinks." He instructed the clerk, "Check Washington and see what they consider a person like Miss O'Hara." The clerk left the courtroom and returned shortly after that. He told the judge, "Washington says she is a British subject." I was furious and told the judge, "I am not responsible for your antiquated records in Washington, D.C." He promptly ruled against me.

I had no choice but to thank him and tell the court, "Under those circumstances, I cannot accept nor do I want to become an American citizen." I turned to walk out of that courtroom, but having the kind of personality that I do, thought I couldn't give up without taking one last crack at him. I was halfway out of the courtroom when I turned back to him and said, "Your Honor, have you thought for one moment about what you are trying to force upon and take away from my child and my unborn children and my unborn grandchildren?" He sat back and listened intently as I went on, "You are trying to take away from them their right to boast and brag about their wonderful and famous Irish mother and grandmother. I just can't accept that."

He'd had enough. The judge threw his hands up and explained, "Get this woman out of here! Give her anything on her papers that she wants, but get her out of here!" The clerk moved in my direction and I simply said, "Thank you, Your Honor."

I didn't know at that time that my certificate of naturalization had already been created, and that they had listed my former nationality as English. Sometime between that date and the date when I was called to be sworn in as an American citizen, they changed my certificate in accordance with the order of the court. Where my former nationality was printed, they had erased "English" and typed over it "Irish". On the back of this document it states that "the erasure made on this certificate as to Former Nationality 'Irish' was made before issuance, to conform to petition. Name changed by order of the court." It is signed by the U.S. District Court.

This was the first time in the history of the United States of America that the American government recognized an Irish person as being Irish. It was one hell of a victory for me because otherwise I would have had to turn down my American citizenship. I could not have accepted it with my former nationality being anything other than Irish, because no other nationality in the world was my own.

A scandal arose in the wake of this, when incorrect reports came out that she had challenged the court during the ceremony in which the oath of allegiance was taken. Judges across the land wrote terrible things about Miss O'Hara, and the federal judge who had presided over that particular allegiance ceremony said that Miss O'Hara was a liar, and that the incident never happened.

He was correct that the event did not happen in his courtroom, but very wrong that it didn't happen at all.

The implications of the decision to list Maureen O'Hara as "Irish" were widespread - and crossed the Atlantic. O'Hara writes:

Apparently, the Irish government was unaware that its citizens were being classified as subjects of Great Britain. On January 29, Prime Minister Eamon De Valera issued the following statement:

We are today an independent republic. We acknowledge no sovereignty except that of our own people. A fact that our attitude during the recent war should have amply demonstrated. Miss O'Hara was right when she asserted she owed no allegiance to Britain and therefore had none which she could renounce.

The prime minister then dispatched his envoys to Washington, D.C., where the Republic of Ireland formally requested that this policy be changed. The policy was changed, and my stand had paved the way for every Irish immigrant to the United States, including my own brothers and sisters, to be legally recognized as Irish from that day forward.

Pretty amazing.

Her autobiography (written with a little bit of help) is lovely. It came out in 2004, which is exciting - because what a long life she has lived! What scope - so you can really get a sense of it in her book. You can hear her voice. There are times when it seems she is leaning towards you, the reader, to whisper a secret. It is not a distant voice, or a cold voice. It's chatty and argumentative (still - I love that - she's like, "I know that everyone SAID I had an affair with John Ford, but I am here to tell you I did not, and all of you boys are barking up the wrong tree." You tell 'em, Maureen!) - charming, passionate, logical, and funny.

I highly recommend it. I recommend it for aviation fans, too. Some good anecdotes here about Howard Hughes, not to mention her later years when she devoted her life to aviation.

The excerpt I chose today just HAD to be about The Quiet Man because you know what? I can't resist.

Watch her smarts as an actress here, in the following excerpt. Not just smart about acting, but smart about script analysis: how she knew what the most important scene in the picture was, and if she nailed THAT, the rest of the picture would flow. That's important - an important mark of a good actress - to not just be worried about her closeups, and her crying scenes - but about the STORY being told. Watch how she goes back to the source material, to look for clues on how to play that scene. Love that.

I also love her version of the famous "whisper" at the end of Quiet Man - what did she whisper? (I wrote about that moment here). In the last shot, the two of them stand together, waving out at the road, laughing, beautiful - and she leans over and whispers something to him. Watch Wayne's reaction. Ha!!! The whisper obviously gets a rise (literally) out of Wayne because in response he chases her back to the house, and, presumably, to bed at the end of the picture. What did she say??

EXCERPT FROM 'Tis Herself: A Memoir, by Maureen O'Hara (with John Nicoletti)

The single day that it did rai was just when Mr. Ford needed it. Right after the scene where Duke and I kiss in the windy cottage and I hit him, there is the sequence in which I run from the cottage, cross a stream, and then fall as the rain and wind storm about me. That was real rain in the scene. The rest of the rain in the picture came from rain machines. The wind actually blew me down in that scene, but I kept going because Mr. Ford always made it clear to his actors that "You do not stop acting no matter what happens in a scene until I say cut. I am the director,"

I loved Mary Kate Danaher. I loved the hell and fire in her. She was a terrific dame, tough, and didn't let herself get walked on. As I readied to begin playing her, I believed that my most important scene in the picture, the one that I had to get just right, was when Mary Kate is in the field herding the sheep and Sean Thornton sees her for the very first time. There is no dialogue between them. It's a moment captured in time, and it's love at first sight. I felt very strongly that if the audience believed it was love at first sight, then we would have lightning in a bottle. But if they didn't, we would have just another lovely romantic comedy on our hands. It had to be perfect, and the script provided me with a little inspiration, but not enough. Sean's line to Michaeleen - "Hey, is that real? She couldn't be" - didn't quite give me what I needed. I found a passage in Walsh's story that hit the mark, and I used it as motivation for how I would play the scene:

And there leaning on a wall was the woman. No ghost woman. Flesh and blood or I have no eyes to see. The sun shining o nher red hair and her scarf green as grass on her shoulders. She was not looking at me. She was looking over my head on the far side of the pool. I only saw her over my shoulder but she was fit to sit with the Mona Lisa amongst the rocks. More beautiful by fire and no less wicked. A woman I never saw before, yet a woman strangely familiar.

The scene comes off so beautifully. Mr. Ford brilliantly kept the camera stationary and had me walk slowly down and out of the frame instead of following me as I walked away. It's one of my favorite shots in the movie, and, if you have never noticed it before, it's worth watching the movie again just to see it.

Of course, the scene that everyone always asks me about is the scene with Duke and me in the cemetery. Most of the Quiet Maniacs, those who keep the film in its cult-classic status, tell me that this is their favorite scene. It's the sequence on the bicycle when Sean and Mary Kate escape Michaeleen's watchful eye. We run into the cemetery and it begins to rain. As thunder chases me under the arch, Duke takes his coat off and wraps it around me to keep me dry and warm. The rain drenches us and his white shirt clings to his body and becomes translucent. In that moment, we are truly together in each other's arms, and we kiss. It is sensual, passionate, and more than any other scene we ever did together displays the on-screen eroticism of the Wayne and O'Hara combination.

There were two parts to that scene. The first part we had to get in one take or Mr. Ford would have strung us up by our toes. It's everything that happens right up to the embrace and kiss. We had to get it in one take because our clothes were sopping wet when we finished. If we missed it, then our costumes would have to be cleaned, dried, and ironed. Our hair would have to be washed, dried, and reset. Makeup would have to be reapplied. These things take hours and hours and cost thousands and thousands of dollars for each take. We got it in one.

Once we were drenched and part one was in the can, we could focus on the kiss. But Mr. Ford rarely allowed more than a couple of takes, and I think we got that one in two. Why is the scene so erotic? Why were Duke and I so electric in our love scenes together? I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne. Duke's presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal hell and fire, it was exciting and thrilling. Other actresses looked as though they would cower and break if Duke raised a hand or even hollered. Not me. I always gave as good as I got, and it was believable. So during those moments of tenderness, when the lovemaking was about to begin, audiences saw for a half second that he had finally tamed me - but only for that half second.

Mr. Ford did not make Duke perform the kiss over and over, as I've read. The suggestion has been that Mr. Ford was living, through Duke, the experience of kissing me. Not in this scene, although I do believe John Ford longed to be every hero he ever brought to the screen. He would have loved to live every role John Wayne ever played. He would have loved to be Sean Thornton. His vivid stories - of riding with Pancho Villa or his longing to be a great naval hero or an Irish rebel - were all fantasies of being men John Ford could never be in life, yet desperately wanted and needed to be. He was a real-life Walter Mitty, years before Thurber gave Mitty literary life.

Visually, there are so many magnificent sequences in the film, like the windy kiss in White O'Morn when Mary Kate is caught cleaning the cottage. That scene was shot in Hollywood, and Mr. Ford used two large wind machines to blow our clothes and my hair for the effect. These were two large airplane propellers on a stand that Mr. Ford controlled by sending hand signals to an operator. Once again, it was a scene tailor-made for Duke and me. He pulls me away from the door and kisses me as I struggle to break free. He tames me for that half second, and I kiss him back, but then follow up with a hard blow across the face for the offense.

Now let me tell you what really happened with that slap. That day on the set, I was mad as hell at Duke and Mr. Ford for something they had done earlier in the day. My plan was to sock Duke in the jaw and rally let him have it. But Duke was no fool, and he saw it coming, he saw it in my face. So he put his hand up to shield his chin, and my hand hit the top of his fingers and snapped back. My plan backfired and my hand hurt like hell. I knew I had really hurt it and tried to hide it in the red petticoat I was wearing. Duke came over and said, "Let me see that hand. You nearly broke my jaw." He lifted it out of hiding; each one of my fingers had blown up like a sausage. I was taken off the set and sent to the local hospital where it was X-rayed. I had a hairline fracture in one of the bones in my wrist, but in the end got no sympathy. I was taken back to the set and put to work.

While one is working on a motion picture, it's natural to get mad at the others from time to time. I almost found myself in John Ford's barrel while we were shooting the Innisfree horse-race sequence down on the beach. The scene again required the use of wind machines during one of my close-ups. But instead of the wind machine blowing my hair away from my face, Mr. Ford put the machine behind me and blew my hair forward. Well, at that time I had hair like wire. It snapped and snapped against my face. The wind was blowing my hair forward and the hair was lashing my eyeballs. It hurt, and I kept blinking. Mr. Ford started yelling at me and insulting me under his breath: "Keep your goddamn eyes open. Why can't you get it right?"

He kept yelling at me and I was getting madder and madder. I finally blew my lid. I put my two hands down the side of the cart and yelled, "What would a baldheaded old son of a bitch like you know about hair lashing across your eyeballs?"

The words had no sooner left my mouth than I was nearly knocked off my feet by the sound of a collective gasp on the set. No one spoke to John Ford that way. There was absolute silence. No one dared move, speak, or even breathe. I don't know why I did it. He made me mad and I just blew my stack. Immediately, I thought, Oh my God. Why didn't I keep my bloody mouth shut? He's going to throw me off the picture. After years of waiting to make The Quiet Man, I was sure I was about to be tossed off the set. I waited for the explosion. I waited without moving a muscle and watched as Mr. Ford cased the entire set with his eyes. He looked at every person - every actor, every crew member, every stuntman - and he did it fast as lightning. I could see the wheels in his head turning. The old man was deciding whether he was going to kill me or laugh and let me off the hook. I didn't know which way it would go until the very moment that he broke into laughter. Everyone on the set collapsed with relief and finally exhaled. They followed Mr. Ford's lead and laughed for ten minutes - out of sheer relief that I was safe. Then we went on and shot the scene.

But in the end the old man got the last laugh. He and Duke agreed to play a joke on me. To do it, they chose the sequence where Duke drags me across town and through the fields. I bet you didn't know that sheep dung has the worst odor you have ever smelled in your life. Well, it does. Mr. Ford and Duke kicked all of the sheep dung they could find onto the hill where I was to be dragged, facedown, on my stomach. Of course, I saw them doing it, and so when they kicked the dung onto the field, Faye, Jimmy, and I kicked it right back off. They'd kick it in, and we'd kick it out. It went on and on, and finally, right before the scene was shot, they won, getting in the last kick. There was no way to kick it out. The camera began to roll and Duke had the time of his life dragging me through it. It was bloody awful. After the scene was over, Mr. Ford had given instructions that I was not to be brought a bucket of water or a towel. He made me keep it on for the rest of the day. I was mad as hell, but I had to laugh too. Isn't showbiz glamorous?

And the sequence itself is perfect for Duke and me. I fight him the entire way, but he won't have it. I swing at him, so he kicks me in the rear. In the end, he tosses me at the feet of Red Will and wins my dowry, and I concede. But the audience knows that he only thinks he has tamed me for good.

One thing I have always loved about John Ford pictures is that they are full of music. Whether it's the Sons of the Pioneers or the Welsh Singers, you know that eventually someone is going to sing in the movie. I was thrilled on The Quiet Man because it was finally my turn. I sang "Young May Moon" in the scene with Barry Fitzgerald, and, of course, "The Isle of Innisfree". I first heard that melody when played by Victor Young at John Ford's home in 1950, and I thought it was beautiful. When we returned from Ireland, John Ford, Charlie Fitz, and I wrote the words that I sang in the movie.

We finished filming in Ireland in early July, and returned to Hollywood to complete the interiors. Half the picture was shot there. Naturally, some of the "Irish Players" had to come back with us, and I was blessed that Charlie and JImmy were among them. I now had my two brothers living with me in America. The interiors were completed at the end of August, and Mr. Ford went right to work editing his movie. When I went in to see the film at Argosy, Duke was there, having just seen it. I walked into the office and he ran over to me, picked me up, and spun me around. He said, "It's wonderful, and you're wonderful." But Herbert Yates of Republic had a different reaction. He wanted The Quiet Man to be no more than a certain length. Ford's version was more than a few minutes over that, and Yates told him to cut the picture further.

But Ford was far too smart for him. When The Quiet Man was previewed to distributors and theater operators at Republic, Mr. Ford instructed the projection operator to stop the projector at the precise length that Yates had requested. Of course, Ford hadn't cut the film at all, and so the screen went black right in the middle of the fight-sequence finale. The audience went wild and demanded that the projector be turned back on. Mr. Ford cued the operator and the fight sequence continued. The audience rose to their feet and cheered when it was over. Old Man Yates wasn't about to touch it after that, and Mr. Ford was allowed to keep his extra ominutes.

There is only one fitting way to end our discussion of The Quiet Man, and that's with a whisper. No matter what part of the world I'm in, the question I am always asked is: "What did you whisper into John Wayne's ear at the end of The Quiet Man?" It was John Ford's idea: it was the ending he wanted. I was told by Mr. Ford exactly what I was to say. At first I refused. I said, "No. I can't. I can't ay that to Duke." But Mr. Ford wanted a very shocked reaction from Duke, and he said, "I'm telling you, you are to say it." I had no choice, and so I agreed, but with a catch: "I'll say it on one condition - that it is never ever repeated or revealed to anyone." So we made a deal. After the scene was over, we told Duke about our agreement and three of us made a pact. There are those who claim that they were told and know what I said. They don't and are lying. John Ford took it to his grave - so did Duke - and the answer will die with me. Curiosity about the whisper has become a great part of the Quiet Man legend. I have no doubt that as long as the film endures, so will the speculation. The Quiet Man meant so much to John Ford, John Wayne, and myself. I know it was their favorite picture too. It bonded us as artists and friends in a way that happens but once in a career. That little piece of The Quiet Man belongs to just us, and so I hope you'll understand as I answer:

The Books: "The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journals of Clifford Odets"

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s - inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights - and he inspires still (although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life. His plays mean the world to me. I was in a production of Golden Boy in Chicago, and his language, of all the great playwrights, is one of the funnest to chew on. It's meaty, poetic, streetsmart, idealistic, tough, hard-boiled, soft underbelly - it's evocative so much of a time and place (you can usually FEEL the Great Depression in his work ... that world is IN the language) - and it's not easy for modern actors to get that language right. It's not NOW. It's not strictly THEN either. But if you have a line like (one of my favorites of his): "Don't give me ice when your heart's on fire!" - you cannot - you MUST not - say it with a wink at the audience, you must NOT add any sense of irony to it ... you must find it within yourself to really feel and mean "Don't give me ice when your heart's on fire" - or you will just sound like a big fat phony up onstage. And worse than that, a condescending phony. Clifford Odets, as a playwright, really reveals falsity in actors ... You can't hide, or do any tricks when you're in an Odets play. You have to be comfortable with that language, make it your own, and you have to fill up the inner life with whatever needs to be there - so that that language feels organic. Nobody SINKS an actor like Clifford Odets. We've got lines in his plays like:

We got the blues, Babe -- the 1935 blues. I'm talkin' this way 'cause I love you. If I didn't, I wouldn't care ...

Or

You won't forget me to your dyin' day -- I was the first guy. Part of your insides. You won't forget. I wrote my name on you -- indelible ink!

Or this, from the same scene = I love this line:

So I made a mistake. For Chris' sake, don't act like the Queen of Romania!

Or

Yes, yes, the whole thing funnels up in me like a fever. My head'll bust a vein!

Or

A sleeping clam at the bottom of the ocean, but I'll wake you up. I'm through with the little wars: no more hacking, making a pound in a good day. Like old man Pike says, every man for himself nowadays, and when you're in a jungle you look out for the wild life. I put on my Chinese good luck ring and I'm out to get mine. You're the first stop!

Or this famous exchange from Golden Boy:

JOE. What did he ever do for you?

LORNA. [with sudden verve] Would you like to know? He loved me in a world of enemies, of stags and bulls! ... And I loved him for that. He picked me up in Friskin's hotel on 39th Street. I was nine weeks behind in rent. I hadn't hit the gutter yet, but I was near. He washed my face and combed my hair. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery --

JOE. And now you're dead.

LORNA. [lashing out] I don't know what the hell you're talking about!

JOE. Yes, you do ...

This is tough stuff. It requires 100% authenticity. It's easy to make it a cliche - the hard-boiled mugs of the 1930s - but if you miss out on what is underneath - these people's real fire and dreams - you got nothin'. Sylvester Stallone has credited Clifford Odets as a major influence on his own writing, and you can hear echoes of it in Rocky and even more so in Paradise Alley - a movie I adore (that will be next up in my Under-rated Movies series) - which takes place in the early years of the 20th century, and the SCRIPT. That's one of the few movies where I thought: "I need to get my hands on that script. I want to see that language on the page." It's fantastic!

Clifford Odets was catapulted into fame in the early 30s with his play Waiting for Lefty (excerpt here. He became a resident playwright with the influential Group Theatre (although they didn't believe in him at all at first - but the success of Waiting for Lefty changed things). It hadn't even been, strictly, a Group Theatre production - it was put together for a benefit night to support a Communist magazine - it was one piece in a long night of agitprop. But it hit to such a degree that it was one of THOSE moments in American theatre - a watershed moment ... God, for a time machine to have seen that play in its first incarnation in 1935! Wendy Smith in her comprehensive book about the Group Theatre Real Life Drama describes what happened on that night, and what it meant:

To Kazan, seated in the auditorium waiting for his cue, the response was "like a roar from sixteen-inchers broadside, audience to players, a way of shouting, 'More! More! More! Go on! Go on! Go on!'" Swept up by the passion they had aroused, the actors were no longer acting. "They were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I have never witnessed in the theatre before," wrote [Harold] Clurman. The twenty-eight-year-old playwright was awed by the emotional conflagration he'd ignited. "You saw theatre in its truest essence," Odets remembered years later. "Suddenly the proscenium arch of the theatre vanished and the audience and actors were at one with each other."

As the play mounted to its climax, the intensity of feeling on and offstage became almost unbearable. When Bobby Lewis dashed in with the news that Lefty has been murdered, no one needed to take an exercise to find the appropriate anger - the actors exploded with it, the audience seethed with it. They exulted as Joe Bromberg, playing the union rebel Agate Keller, tore himself loose from the hired gunmen and declared their independence: "HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE'RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS ... And when we die they'll know what we did to make a new world!"

"Well, what's the answer?" Bromberg demanded. In the audience, as planned, Odets, Herbie Ratner, and Lewis Leverett began shouting "Strike!" "LOUDER!" Bromberg yelled - and, one by one, from all over the auditorium, individual voices called out, "Strike!" Suddenly the entire audience, some 1,400 people, rose and roared, "Strike! Strike!" The actors froze, stunned by the spontaneous demonstration. The militant cries gave way to cheers and applause so thunderous the cast was kept onstage for forty-five minutes to receive the crowd's inflamed tribute. "When they couldn't applaud anymore, they stomped their feet," said Ruth Nelson. "All I could think was, 'My God, they're going to break the balcony down!' It was terrible, it was so beautiful." The actors were all weeping. When Clurman persuaded Odets to take a bow, the audience stormed the stage and embraced the man who had voiced their hopes and fears and deepest aspirations. "That was the dram all of us in the Group Theatre had," said Kazan, "to be embraced that way by a theatreful of people."

"The audience wouldn't leave," said Cheryl Crawford. "I was afraid they were going to tear the seats out and throw them on the stage." When the astounded stage manager finally rang down the curtain, they remained out front, talking and arguing about the events in a play taht seemed as real to them as their own lives. Actors and playwright were overwhelmed and a little frightened by the near-religious communion they had just shared. Odets retreated to a backstage bathroom; his excitement was so intense he threw up, then burst into tears. The dressing room was hushed as the actors removed their makeup. They emerged onto 14th Street to find clusters of people still gathered outside, laughing, crying, hugging each other, clapping their hands. "There was almost a sense of pure madness about it," Morris Carnovsky felt.

No one wanted to go home. Sleep was out of the question. Most of the Group went to an all-night restaurant - no one can remember now which one - and tried to eat. Odets sat alone: pale, withdrawn, not talking at all. Everyone was too dazed to have much to say. It was dawn before they could bring themselves to separate, to admit that the miracle was over.

There had never been a night like it in the American theatre. The Group became a vessel into which were poured the rage, frustration, desperation, and finally exultation, not just of an angry young man named Clifford Odets, but of every single person at the Civic Rep who longed for an end to personal and political depression, who needed someone to tell them they could stand up and change their lives. The Group had experienced the "unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need" Clurman had said was the basis for a true theatre: during his inspiring talks at Brookfield, at the thrilling final run-through of Connelly, in some of the best performances of Success Story. Never before had they shared it with an entire theatre full of people, never before had it seemed as though the lines they spoke hadn't been written but rather emerged from a collective heart and soul. Theatre and life merged, as Clurman had promised they could.

Waiting for Lefty changed people's ideas of what theatre was. More than an evening's entertainment, more even than a serious examination of the contemporary scene by a thoughtful writer, theatre at its best could be a living embodiment of communal values and aspirations. Theatre mattered, art had meaning, culture wasn't the property of an affluent, educated few but an expression of the joys and sorrows of the human condition as they could be understood and shared by everyone.

Waiting for Lefty made Clifford Odets a star in New York, and in the circles of the American Left - and while the Group Theatre had been devoted to developing new work, and fostering playwrights who could speak to the NOW, they had missed out on the genius in their midst. They ended up putting on many of his plays - which are now considered classics of the American theatre: Awake and Sing (excerpt here), Paradise Lost (excerpt here), Golden Boy (excerpt here) - just to name a few. He was the voice of the Great Depression, of the angry radical, the Jewish New Yorker, the downtrodden, the hopeful. Odets was a Zeitgeist kind of guy. It's one of the reasons why he found his later career so strenuous and difficult ... when you tap into a Zeitgeist of a certain time and place (and not just tap into it - but give voice to it) it can be nigh on impossible to translate that into another time/place. That's what happened to him. Also, how do you compete with such blazing early success? I love all of Odets' plays - not just his famous 1930s plays - I love Big Knife (excerpt here), I love Country Girl (excerpt here), I love The Flowering Peach (excerpt here)... but his time, his PLACE, was the mid-1930s. And that's IT. Without context, Odets' work does not translate. HIs writing does ... but these are, necessarily, "period" pieces, although at the time of their first productions they were the most relevant new thing anyone had ever seen. There's a similarity here to William Inge, although his themes and style are quite different. He was the biggest playwright of the 1950s. He was a Neil Simon, a Tony Kushner - in terms of the HITS that he had. But outside of the stifled conventional atmosphere of the 50s - where young people bucked up against the social and sexual conventions of the older generation - his work doesn't travel. You can't REALLY update William Inge. You have to place those plays in the 50s. They don't travel.

Without understanding that context of Odets, his plays may seem ... trite, or small, or naive. His theme is how the individual man can maintain his dignity, his human worth, in the middle of a capitalist society. He has written lines like, "Is life written on dollar bills?" WORTH has nothing to do with money ... but when you have no money, it sure as shit is difficult to remember that. His plays in the 30s insist upon human dignity, but also (like in Golden Boy) insist on the fact that there is compromise, and tragedy. This is where he can seem, to modern eyes, a bit naive - but it is essential to place him in his context.

But what remains (for me anyway) is not so much the thematic elements, the snapshot of urban life in the 30s - but the language. Odets' language!! It's raw, it's poetic, and it's not realistic. I like to read his plays out loud, just to myself - that language is fun fun fun to say.

Harold Clurman wrote about Odets:

Odets wrote some of the finest love scenes to be found in American drama. An all-enveloping warmth, love in its broadest sense, is a constant in all Odets' writing, the very root of his talent. IT is there in tumultuous harangues, in his denunciations and his murmurs. It is by turns hot and tender. Sometimes it sounds in whimpers. It is present as much in the scenes between grandfather and grandson in Awake as in those of Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy. It is touchingly wry in Rocket. This explains why these scenes are chosen by so many actors for auditions and classwork.

The Group Theatre lasted for only a decade. By the end of it, much of the original mission had been smoothed over - and they were hiring "outside" people for roles, as opposed to relying on the ensemble, and there were many other issues. People wanted out. And the world was changing, too - the Group had some really rough times at the end, where they couldn't seem to "hit it" as they had earlier in the decade. Had they just run their course?

Clifford Odets wrote a play called Night Music, and it is, I think, one of his best. It has Saroyan elements - a sort of magical middle-of-the-night quality - and there is much of it that I feel Lanford Wilson was inspired by, later in the 60s - even though his characters in Balm in Gilead are the dregs of society. But Odets - by having his play full of people - there has to be 40, 50 characters in that play - similar to Wilson - and these denizens of the night streets, the people who only come out at 2 a.m. ... the floating snippets of conversation, fragments heard, all operating in order to highlight the lonely journey of the two leads towards each other - really reminds me of Wilson. Night Music is an ambitious play and I would love to see it done more. It's funny, it's touching, it has great characters - and it's one of those plays that take place in only one night - a crazy night when nobody gets any sleep, and everyone appears to be homeless, looking for something in the crazy 3 a.m. hour. This would be the last play put on by the Group Theatre. It was 1940. Elia Kazan was the male lead. I believe Harold Clurman directed. It was a production and a half - a giant stage, tons of characters ... and for many different reasons, the play was a huge flop. It was the end of the Group Theatre. They had really needed a hit, and had hoped Night Music would be it. I somehow think that Night Music COULD have been a hit. It is not a dreary play, there are not awkward plot elements like some of Odets' earlier stuff - he keeps it light and funny and romantic. Seems like a sure thing to me. But for whatever reaon (and Clifford had many opinions about it) - the play failed to find an audience.

It was over. The grand experiment in American theatre was over. The ensemble members would scatter to the four winds. Some would find their way to movie stardom (like John Garfield, Elia Kazan) - others would eventually become the premiere acting teachers in this country (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis). Many of them were impacted by the Hollywood blacklist, due to their Communist associations in the past - and also just guilt by association. Odets went to Hollywood and started writing screenplays. His journey is told in the Coen brothers' Barton Fink. Odets never found his stride in Hollywood - he had a similar sensibility to F. Scott Fitzgerald - he was an artist and he couldn't seem to protect himself properly from the mercenary demands, and ... he was always left with the feeling of: "Is this all there is?"

Not a happy man.

In 1940, during the rehearsal and failed production of Night Music, Clifford Odets kept a journal. That journal has been published and it is now certainly a classic of its kind, essential reading for anyone who is an artist, for struggling actors, playwrights - whatever - When I was in grad school, I didn't know one person who hadn't read it. It's AMAZING and it makes you want to ... oh ... I don't know ... run out and be an artist! Have every part of your life reflect your commitment to your art! LIVE TO THE FULLEST. Etc. Odets was obviously not having the best year in 1940 - so he was not at the top of the world ... Much of the diary describes late nights at jazz clubs, troubled rehearsals during the day, and evenings when he would lose himself in his beloved Beethoven (boy, is he eloquent on Beethoven) - to try to regroup. It's a rather wandering type of journal - as any journal would be ... and on every single page there is something to "take away". Almost none of it has to do with to-do lists or what he did that day. He is trying to work out his own artistic problems in the pages of his journal - his issues with "form" and character and subtext ... at times he's like a dog with a bone - an entire week he devotes to talking about "form", and what that means for him as a playwright, and how Beethoven teaches him about form.

It's a wonderful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I pick it up all the time - it's one of my constant books, something I dip into, just open it up and whatever page it falls on there will be some gem, something that helps me to go deeper, to contemplate, to struggle, to strive.

He is about to go into his long decline - which is sad, because he has such fire and energy here. In 1944, he made his directorial debut with None but the Lonely Heart - starring Cary Grant. This was the second part Grant was nominated for an Oscar for - mainly because of the big crying scene at the end. (The fact that Grant would not be nominated - then or now - for his performance in His Girl Friday - is just indicative of how silly those awards can be!!)

Odets and Grant were friends until the very end - and Odets had a particularly sad end. The guy had a long way to fall, and boy, did he fall. Grant would lend him money, or go and sit with him and talk and laugh and try to help his friend. None but the Lonely Heart is obviously Odets-ian - the themes, the compromises (it's always about choosing money or love, choosing money or humanity) - but what's really interesting about it is how great it LOOKS. The MOOD of the movie is really the reason to see it. It has an almost Fritz Lang-ish feel to it, eerie, melancholy, big empty urban streets, the alienation of urban life made manifest in the dark cobblestones - it's a great looking movie.

But The Time is Ripe gives us just a glimpse - a glimpse of a working man of the theatre in 1940 - working on one particular play - and, as Stanley Kauffman has said in response to the book - Odets comes off as "bursting, struggling, impatient, agonizing, egocentric, limited ... generous ... eager to understand his society, even more eager to be the best dramatist that his times and his talents would allow."

I consider The Time is Ripe to be required reading. Not only is it interesting about Odets himself - but it is interesting about America, and cultural issues, and Marxism, and Stalin, and the big thought of Russia - and all of those elements of the Left at that time - here they are, on paper. As always, Odets was a man of his time. He embodied it. Thank God he could write. He might have been just another propagandist, but you cannot argue with the power of those early plays. Yes, he has a point of view. What good artist doesn't? But as I mentioned before: what really remains, what he has left us, is those WORDS.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets

Thursday, February 22, 1940

This is the time for opening the play. Harold gave the cast a brief line run-through, but I stayed at home, sleeping, resting, lounging it out against my slowly constricting nerves. Restless, finally, I jumped into the roadster and rode out to Sunnyside to take Bill and Lee to dinner. I chattered away, quite calm, really, to that peculiar point of indifference which comes from having done all that one can do in a situation. We rode into New York and had dinner across the street from the theatre, at Sardi's. A lot of the people who are going across the show were eating dinner there - it was like running the gauntlet. Stella Adler was there with a party, smoke-eyed and neurotic - usually when you are dying she is more dramatic about the event than you are! Finally I pushed my way through a lot of well-wishing people and went over to the theatre. The cast was in fine shape, quietly making up in their own rooms; no noise, no excitement backstage, things routine and orderly.

The audience was no better or worse than the usual opening night crowd. If anything they were an edge more respectful. Harold I had met outside the theatre for a moment - he was white and tired and was going to see a musical comedy, true to his habit of never attending an opening. I, on the other hand, get a kind of perverse spiteful pleasure from attending an opening. I saw none of the critics but shook hands with several friends.

The performance of the play was tip-top - the cast had never been better. The play suffered from what had always been wrong with it because of a certain lack in the direction - a lack of clear outlining of situations, a lack of building up scenes, a certain missing in places of dramatic intensity. But none of these things was enough to do vital harm to a beautiful show, smooth, powerful and yet tender, fresh, moving, and touching, with real quality in all the parts. But I could see during the first act that the audience was taking it more seriously than it deserved; and I knew that the old thing was here again - the critics had come expecting King Lear, not a small delicate play. It all made me very tired, but at the end I thought to myself that it didn't matter, for the show was more or less what I intended; it was lovely and fresh, no matter what the critics said. And I knew, too, that if another and unknown writer's name had been on the script, there would have been critical raves the next day.

People surged backstage after the curtain - they all seemed to have had a good time. There were the usual foolish remarks from many of them - "Enjoyable, but I don't know why," etc., etc. Also, a good deal of insincere gushing from a lot of people who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in your ribs. God knows why!

I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie [John] Garfield, Boris Aronson, old Harry Carey and his wife, Morris and Phoebe later, Harold, Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft[, Bobby Lewis and his Mexican woman, etc. etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever - all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.

Friday, February 23, 1940

The biggest shock I have experienced since the auto crash in Mexico a year ago was the reviews of the play today. Perhaps it was the serious lack of sleep which kept me so calm and quiet. I wanted to send the Times man a wire telling him I thought his notice stupid and insulting, but I gave up that idea after a while. Equally distressing to me was the attitude at the office, an ugly passivity. They are quite inured there to the humdrum commercial aspect of doing a play this way - close if the notices are bad.

My feelings were and are very simple. I feel as if a lovely delicate child, tender and humorous, had been knocked down by a truck and lay dying. For this show has all the freshness of a child. It was Boris A. who called the turn. He said, "This show is very moving to me, a real artwork, but I don't think they will get its quality - it is not commercial."

In the morning I cashed fifteen thousand dollars worth of the baby bonds I hold. I thought to spend it on advertising, to keep the show open, etc., but by the time I finished at the office in the afternoon it was easy to see the foolishness of that; the show costs almost ten thousand a week to run.

So, friend, this is the American theatre, before, now, and in the future. This is where you live and this is what it is - this is the nature of the beast. Here is how the work and delight and pain of many months ends up in one single night. This is murder, to be exact, the murder of loveliness, of talent, of aspiration, of sincerity, the brutal imperception and indifference to one of the few projects which promise to keep the theatre alive. And it is murder in the first degree - with forethought (perhaps not malice, perhaps!), not second or third degree. Something will have to be done about these "critics", these lean dry men who know little or nothing about the theatre despite their praise of the actors and production. How can it happen that this small handful of men can do such murderous mischief in a few hours? How can it be that we must all depend on them for our progress and growth, they who maybe drank a cocktail too much, quarreled with a wife, had indigestion or a painful toe before they came to see the play - they who are not critics, who are insensitive, who understand only the most literal realism, they who should be dealing in children's ABC blocks? How can the audience be reached directly, without the middleman intervention of these fools?

I think now to write very inexpensive plays in the future, few actors, one set; perhaps hire a cheap theatre and play there. Good or bad, these "critics" must never be quoted, they must not opportunistically be used. A way must be found to beat them if people like myself are to stay in the theatre with any health and love. Only bitterness results this way, with no will or impulse for fresh work. The values must be sorted out and I must see my way clearly ahead, for I mean to work in the American theatre for many years to come.

I have such a strong feeling - a lovely child was murdered yesterday. Its life will drag on for another week or ten days, but the child is already stilled. A few friends will remember, that's all.

The Books: "As I Am: An Autobiography" (Patricia Neal)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

As I Am: An Autobiography, by Patricia Neal

This is one of those rare books where my response to it was, "Dear God, it's me, Sheila. Could you please give Patricia Neal a break? Hasn't she had enough??" The bare bones of her life story are enough to make my blood run cold - because so much of what happened to her was random, the luck of the draw. It's a great fear of mine - to be incapacitated by something like a stroke - something where my mind has gone, and I have to rebuild it ... where I am still in there, but my body won't behave. It's terrifying. Not to mention being (like Patricia Neal was) pregnant! But there's so much more to this fantastic book than just the story of her stroke and her incredible recovery (which had as much to do with pure grit and willpower than anything else). It's beautifully written - emotional and in-the-moment ... The things that hurt her once still seem to hurt her, the experiences she had as a young woman still seem real to her ... Patricia Neal is not "over" it, she doesn't come across as distanced in any way - and yet at the same time, I don't get that ikky sense that I get from some biographies that she has an axe to grind. No, what I get is that Neal - as a wonderful actress - is able to do the same thing in her writing that she can do as an actress: imagine herself into another world, this time her past - and re-experience it. You FEEL what she feels. You can't believe what this woman has gone through.

And what an actress.

Life is unfair. That's one of the things I get from this book (although I have plenty of evidence before my own eyes to realize that) ... and much of what life is has to do with how you RESPOND to the SHIT that happens to you.

I think Neal's book is fantastic. It's fantastic about acting, and her career - moments where she had breakthroughs, troubled moments with directors, whatever ... and it's also fantastic about the real-life aspects: love affairs, life, motherhood, grief, religion, career ... It's quite a book, and I love the title. You really feel, by the end of the book, that you have been through the wringer with her - and that she has truly earned the right to say the words, "As I Am." It was hard-won, that peace with herself, hard hard won ... She had to scrape and claw for so much, she had to climb herself back to health, she had to insist to herself that life, after all, was worth living. The story of her recovery from her stroke brings tears to my eyes. It's terrible. She describes lying in bed, being unable to think of the words for things ... saying things like "coliseum" when she means "cigarette" ... and also stuff like shitting the bed, but being unable to move, and weeping, as the nurses come to clean her up, humiliated, devastated.

Roald Dahl, her husband, was not a warm man. There was something off about him. He told Patricia Neal he loved her twice in their whole marriage. But his response to her stroke - what we would call now as "tough love" - is much of why she recovered. Well, that and the neurosurgery team at the hospital. But when Neal came home, she was on her own. Dahl refused to baby her. If it took her 45 minutes to button her blouse, then it took her 45 minutes. He would not help. They would have enormous battles, and she would be screaming at him - only she still couldn't remember the words for things (horrifying - it just gives me chills) - so she'd be shouting gibberish, trying, trying, to remember the word for, oh, "son of a bitch" or "I hate you".

Prior to marrying Roald Dahl, Neal - early in her career - had been cast in The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper.

Gary Cooper was a married man, but he was also a famous philanderer. He had great respect for his wife, Rocky, and always stopped his affairs before they went too far. Rocky knew all about them, and I have no idea what it was like for her - but the two of them seemed good companions. Cooper needed to be married, having a homelife was very important to him - and Rocky loved her position in society as his wife. It was a tradeoff. Cooper and Neal had an affair. Neal was not a floozy, not really, and she fell so in love with Gary Cooper that she counts him as the great love of her life. Really the only man she ever loved. Her entire book ends with her going out to lunch with Rocky, and the two of them talking about Gary, and Rocky seeming to understand what it was that Neal had lost (after all, she loved him too) - and it felt good for the two of them to sit there and reminisce about him. Rather extraordinary, huh? Neal writes:

This was the one man I loved passionately, the one I had fought to get. But the bond of his marriage was stronger than our passion. And I was forced to submit to that. I am now grateful that I did. If I had not married Roald Dahl, I would have been denied my children, even my life, because he truly saved me and I will be forever grateful to him for that.

Complicated. Life is not simple.

In 1963, Patricia Neal played Alma, the earthy humorous housekeeper in Hud. How I love that performance. Her scenes with Paul Newman should be studied by anyone who is interested in acting. THAT is how it's done, peeps. Obstacle, objective, decisions being made on the fly, impulses followed or ignored, subtext stronger than text ... So so good. Neal won the Oscar for Best Actress.

The year before, her 7-year-old daughter Olivia had died, unexpectedly, from measles encephalitis. Neal was still struggling, at the time of filming Hud, with an almost baffled sense of grief, how do you incorporate such an event into your life, how on earth do you go on?? Watching her as Alma is a true testament to the power of art as some kind of healing force. She is not "playing" her own biography here. Alma is a tough Texas woman, with some miles on her, a divorce in her past, and yet a philisophical attitude which allows her to hang out with tough men and be one of them. Despite her housekeeper status. It's a marvelous portrayal - three-dimensional in its scope and a constant surprise. Her grief about her daughter was somehow mysteriously channeled into that performance ... It was like Neal needed to lose herself in her work, and boy, did she ever.

In 1965 she had a debilitating stroke. Actually, she had three strokes - which left her in a coma. It was thought she would never come out of it. She was 39 years old. A long road to recovery followed, and she credits much of it to Roald Dahl, who shouted at her until she could do nothing else but fight back. He would not let her be weak. Whatever issues they had in their marriage (and who knows, maybe Dahl sensed all along that he was her second choice) it did not stop Dahl from insisting that she get strong. If she had to hate him in the process, then maybe that would be good for her, motivational.

Neal describes sitting and watching the Academy Awards in 1965 - post-stroke - where, if she hadn't been incapacitated, she would have been there to present the award to the Best Actor - it was her spot, because she had won the award the year before. Audrey Hepburn gave out the award in her place, and Neal - still sick, still unable to form or remember words - had the expectation that Hepburn would at least acknowledge her - would say something nice about her, to remind the audience, "This should have been Patricia Neal presenting ..." but Hepburn didn't say a word. Just gave out the award. Neal flipped out. She and Dahl were sitting on the couch at home, and Neal started shouting at the television, expressing her anger at being so forgotten and ignored. It hurt her. But because of the stroke, what came out was gibberish - she couldn't remember any words for anything - but the sentiment was clear.

Dahl took that as a wonderful sign. That Neal had a memory of something outside of her own sickness, and was invested enough in it to be pissed off ... He thought that was great. A sign of health. Being able to say, "Goddammit, that is so UNFAIR" is a sign of mental health (I've often thought so ... when we stop having the ability to rail at the unfair-ness of things, we lose a lot of our fire ...). I think Dahl was on to something - and perhaps he didn't really love her (sure doesn't sound like it) - but perhaps it was that very DISTANCE from her, the fact that he could remain separate from her, and see her clearly, that he didn't feel the need to hover over his poor darling, cooing over how sick she was ... that made him such a great and enormous help in her recovery.

She was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (amazing to contemplate, huh?) - but she turned it down, feeling that it was still too close to her stroke. Neal rebuilt her life. She worked with a speech therapist, she worked with neurologists ... and she came back. When she returned to work, in The Subject Was Roses, she was again nominated for an Academy Award.

As I Am is one of my favorites in this particular genre: entertainment autobiography ... It palpitates with real feeling, and is very specific. She remembers people - Kazan, Cooper ... and she also, frankly, comes off as someone I would love to know. A real person. Whose life has been a true journey. Who had shit thrown at her - time and time again - and she survived it. Not without a lot of fighting and a lot of grief - and one nervous breakdown - but she survived.

Her memories of Gary Cooper are so tender that it makes my heart crack ... and I often wonder, in my own life, what is left in me to give someone else ... after my great and failed love. My guy said to me, in a song he wrote for me, "You'll always be my great lost love." Thanks for nothing, pal. No, just kidding. But it really resonated with me, her journey. And how she tells it like it is. She does not spare Dahl in many respects. He had an affair with her best friend - which was what finally ended their 30-year marriage. He laughed in her face when she told him her heart was broken. I don't think he ever really recovered from his daughter dying ... it made him twisted and mean. So Neal just tells it like it is. BUT she does not throw out ye olde baby with ye olde bathwater. Dahl MADE her get well, MADE her recover, on her own, from the strokes that should have killed her. And so, like she says, she owes him her LIFE. Pretty amazing.

I chose an excerpt today that really moves me. In 1959 Patricia Neal was cast in the play Miracle Worker, being directed by Arthur Penn. She was a big enough star at that point that she was hurt that she was not offered the role of Annie. She played Helen's mother. BUT: Neal took the role, knowing that she needed to work - rather than not work - and yes, her ego took a blow ... but I love her grace here, and also her honesty. It was not easy to back off and not be the star. But she did.

EXCERPT FROM As I Am: An Autobiography, by Patricia Neal

It was April in 1959 when I heard from Arthur Penn, the director. He was casting William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, about the young Helen Keller. Everyone knew it was bound to be one of the biggest hits of the season and the vehicle of a lifetime for the actress who played Annie Sullivan, Helen's teacher.

The only problem was, Arthur was not offering me that part. He thought I would be wonderful as Helen's mother. It was not a starring role, but I hadn't done a play in the United States in four years or a film in three. I was in no position to command the star spot and I knew it. I could fantasize all I wanted, but if I was to keep working I would have to go with what was offered.

The star of Miracle Worker was Anne Bancroft. Like me, Anne had left Hollywood and returned to New York to make a new start. I first saw her at The Studio and admired her as an actress. Later I got to know her socially at the Strasberg parties. She was great fun and I liked her very much. Our paths were destined to cross many times.

We were in rehearsal only a few days when Anne and Arthur invited me for a drink. Arthur asked me quite candidly if I resented not playing the star role. I was equally candid. I admitted that I did, indeed, find it tough to step down, but I was trying my damndest to do it graciously. They breathed sighs of relief. Both of them thanked me for being honest and assured me they knew how difficult it was. I can truthfully say that the fact that I adored Anne and Arthur helped. I felt better than I had in days for having gotten it out. It was one of the happiest companies I ever worked with. It also afforded me a reunion with Phyllis Adams, of my pavement-pounding days. Phyllis was now married to George Jenkins, our set designer.

Near the end of rehearsals I saw Fred Cox, our producer, in the auditorium with a man and a woman. I couldn't see their faces from the stage, but the man kept waving at me. Finally I walked down the aisle to see who he was.

"Do you recognize me?" he asked with a tinge of wickedness. "We met in Chicago."

I searched the familiar face for a name.

"I'm the fellow you told not to go into show business."

"Oh yes," I said, nodding. "Michael ..."

Fred helped me out. "Nichols."

The woman with him, of course, was Elaine May.

I had gone six weeks without my family and we were just beginning out-of-town previews in Boston when Roald arrived with the girls. I could not wait to see my babies, and as they got off the elevator, I bellowed my welcome. Olvia looked at me with fright and Tessa let out a terrified wail. They obviously had no idea they were coming to see me and, in fact, did not seem to know why I had been absent from their lives for so long. I was annoyed with Roald for this oversight, but later, when all was well and we laughed it off, I scolded myself for making too much of it.

Eventually Roald came to the show. Following the performance, Arthur appeared at my dressing room. He was shaking with anger. "He's quite a fellow, that husband of yours. He doesn't think we have much of a play. Of course, he gave us his recommendations. We'd appreciate it if you'd see that he doesn't come again."

I was humiliated. And so angry that when Roald came backstage, I seethed. "This has nothing to do with you. Will you keep your fucking nose out of my business and let me make my own enemies!" We did not speak again about the progress of the play.

The Miracle Worker opened on October 19, 1959. Our reviews were as great as everyone hoped. Especially for Anne and little Patty Duke, who played Helen.

I got pregnant on opening night. Obviously Roald did not hold grudges.

Patty was older than the six-and-a-half-year-old Helen she portrayed on stage. I used to take her home with me and she was the perfect guest, completely charming and gracious. She loved to read stories to the girls, who adored her. Her visits spurred Olivia's pestering to come and see Mummy act for the first time. I arranged for Sonia to take her to a matinee but asked that she kept in the lobby during my first scene, fearing my frantic screams for my stage child might set up a howl from my own. After the performance, she looked at me very seriously and said, "I loved you, Mummy. You were jolly good." At that moment I didn't mind that Anne had gotten all the reviews. I had just gotten the most important notice of my life.

The Books: "As I Am: An Autobiography" (Patricia Neal)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

As I Am: An Autobiography, by Patricia Neal

This is one of those rare books where my response to it was, "Dear God, it's me, Sheila. Could you please give Patricia Neal a break? Hasn't she had enough??" The bare bones of her life story are enough to make my blood run cold - because so much of what happened to her was random, the luck of the draw. It's a great fear of mine - to be incapacitated by something like a stroke - something where my mind has gone, and I have to rebuild it ... where I am still in there, but my body won't behave. It's terrifying. Not to mention being (like Patricia Neal was) pregnant! But there's so much more to this fantastic book than just the story of her stroke and her incredible recovery (which had as much to do with pure grit and willpower than anything else). It's beautifully written - emotional and in-the-moment ... The things that hurt her once still seem to hurt her, the experiences she had as a young woman still seem real to her ... Patricia Neal is not "over" it, she doesn't come across as distanced in any way - and yet at the same time, I don't get that ikky sense that I get from some biographies that she has an axe to grind. No, what I get is that Neal - as a wonderful actress - is able to do the same thing in her writing that she can do as an actress: imagine herself into another world, this time her past - and re-experience it. You FEEL what she feels. You can't believe what this woman has gone through.

And what an actress.

Life is unfair. That's one of the things I get from this book (although I have plenty of evidence before my own eyes to realize that) ... and much of what life is has to do with how you RESPOND to the SHIT that happens to you.

I think Neal's book is fantastic. It's fantastic about acting, and her career - moments where she had breakthroughs, troubled moments with directors, whatever ... and it's also fantastic about the real-life aspects: love affairs, life, motherhood, grief, religion, career ... It's quite a book, and I love the title. You really feel, by the end of the book, that you have been through the wringer with her - and that she has truly earned the right to say the words, "As I Am." It was hard-won, that peace with herself, hard hard won ... She had to scrape and claw for so much, she had to climb herself back to health, she had to insist to herself that life, after all, was worth living. The story of her recovery from her stroke brings tears to my eyes. It's terrible. She describes lying in bed, being unable to think of the words for things ... saying things like "coliseum" when she means "cigarette" ... and also stuff like shitting the bed, but being unable to move, and weeping, as the nurses come to clean her up, humiliated, devastated.

Roald Dahl, her husband, was not a warm man. There was something off about him. He told Patricia Neal he loved her twice in their whole marriage. But his response to her stroke - what we would call now as "tough love" - is much of why she recovered. Well, that and the neurosurgery team at the hospital. But when Neal came home, she was on her own. Dahl refused to baby her. If it took her 45 minutes to button her blouse, then it took her 45 minutes. He would not help. They would have enormous battles, and she would be screaming at him - only she still couldn't remember the words for things (horrifying - it just gives me chills) - so she'd be shouting gibberish, trying, trying, to remember the word for, oh, "son of a bitch" or "I hate you".

Prior to marrying Roald Dahl, Neal - early in her career - had been cast in The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper.

Gary Cooper was a married man, but he was also a famous philanderer. He had great respect for his wife, Rocky, and always stopped his affairs before they went too far. Rocky knew all about them, and I have no idea what it was like for her - but the two of them seemed good companions. Cooper needed to be married, having a homelife was very important to him - and Rocky loved her position in society as his wife. It was a tradeoff. Cooper and Neal had an affair. Neal was not a floozy, not really, and she fell so in love with Gary Cooper that she counts him as the great love of her life. Really the only man she ever loved. Her entire book ends with her going out to lunch with Rocky, and the two of them talking about Gary, and Rocky seeming to understand what it was that Neal had lost (after all, she loved him too) - and it felt good for the two of them to sit there and reminisce about him. Rather extraordinary, huh? Neal writes:

This was the one man I loved passionately, the one I had fought to get. But the bond of his marriage was stronger than our passion. And I was forced to submit to that. I am now grateful that I did. If I had not married Roald Dahl, I would have been denied my children, even my life, because he truly saved me and I will be forever grateful to him for that.

Complicated. Life is not simple.

In 1963, Patricia Neal played Alma, the earthy humorous housekeeper in Hud. How I love that performance. Her scenes with Paul Newman should be studied by anyone who is interested in acting. THAT is how it's done, peeps. Obstacle, objective, decisions being made on the fly, impulses followed or ignored, subtext stronger than text ... So so good. Neal won the Oscar for Best Actress.

The year before, her 7-year-old daughter Olivia had died, unexpectedly, from measles encephalitis. Neal was still struggling, at the time of filming Hud, with an almost baffled sense of grief, how do you incorporate such an event into your life, how on earth do you go on?? Watching her as Alma is a true testament to the power of art as some kind of healing force. She is not "playing" her own biography here. Alma is a tough Texas woman, with some miles on her, a divorce in her past, and yet a philisophical attitude which allows her to hang out with tough men and be one of them. Despite her housekeeper status. It's a marvelous portrayal - three-dimensional in its scope and a constant surprise. Her grief about her daughter was somehow mysteriously channeled into that performance ... It was like Neal needed to lose herself in her work, and boy, did she ever.

In 1965 she had a debilitating stroke. Actually, she had three strokes - which left her in a coma. It was thought she would never come out of it. She was 39 years old. A long road to recovery followed, and she credits much of it to Roald Dahl, who shouted at her until she could do nothing else but fight back. He would not let her be weak. Whatever issues they had in their marriage (and who knows, maybe Dahl sensed all along that he was her second choice) it did not stop Dahl from insisting that she get strong. If she had to hate him in the process, then maybe that would be good for her, motivational.

Neal describes sitting and watching the Academy Awards in 1965 - post-stroke - where, if she hadn't been incapacitated, she would have been there to present the award to the Best Actor - it was her spot, because she had won the award the year before. Audrey Hepburn gave out the award in her place, and Neal - still sick, still unable to form or remember words - had the expectation that Hepburn would at least acknowledge her - would say something nice about her, to remind the audience, "This should have been Patricia Neal presenting ..." but Hepburn didn't say a word. Just gave out the award. Neal flipped out. She and Dahl were sitting on the couch at home, and Neal started shouting at the television, expressing her anger at being so forgotten and ignored. It hurt her. But because of the stroke, what came out was gibberish - she couldn't remember any words for anything - but the sentiment was clear.

Dahl took that as a wonderful sign. That Neal had a memory of something outside of her own sickness, and was invested enough in it to be pissed off ... He thought that was great. A sign of health. Being able to say, "Goddammit, that is so UNFAIR" is a sign of mental health (I've often thought so ... when we stop having the ability to rail at the unfair-ness of things, we lose a lot of our fire ...). I think Dahl was on to something - and perhaps he didn't really love her (sure doesn't sound like it) - but perhaps it was that very DISTANCE from her, the fact that he could remain separate from her, and see her clearly, that he didn't feel the need to hover over his poor darling, cooing over how sick she was ... that made him such a great and enormous help in her recovery.

She was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (amazing to contemplate, huh?) - but she turned it down, feeling that it was still too close to her stroke. Neal rebuilt her life. She worked with a speech therapist, she worked with neurologists ... and she came back. When she returned to work, in The Subject Was Roses, she was again nominated for an Academy Award.

As I Am is one of my favorites in this particular genre: entertainment autobiography ... It palpitates with real feeling, and is very specific. She remembers people - Kazan, Cooper ... and she also, frankly, comes off as someone I would love to know. A real person. Whose life has been a true journey. Who had shit thrown at her - time and time again - and she survived it. Not without a lot of fighting and a lot of grief - and one nervous breakdown - but she survived.

Her memories of Gary Cooper are so tender that it makes my heart crack ... and I often wonder, in my own life, what is left in me to give someone else ... after my great and failed love. My guy said to me, in a song he wrote for me, "You'll always be my great lost love." Thanks for nothing, pal. No, just kidding. But it really resonated with me, her journey. And how she tells it like it is. She does not spare Dahl in many respects. He had an affair with her best friend - which was what finally ended their 30-year marriage. He laughed in her face when she told him her heart was broken. I don't think he ever really recovered from his daughter dying ... it made him twisted and mean. So Neal just tells it like it is. BUT she does not throw out ye olde baby with ye olde bathwater. Dahl MADE her get well, MADE her recover, on her own, from the strokes that should have killed her. And so, like she says, she owes him her LIFE. Pretty amazing.

I chose an excerpt today that really moves me. In 1959 Patricia Neal was cast in the play Miracle Worker, being directed by Arthur Penn. She was a big enough star at that point that she was hurt that she was not offered the role of Annie. She played Helen's mother. BUT: Neal took the role, knowing that she needed to work - rather than not work - and yes, her ego took a blow ... but I love her grace here, and also her honesty. It was not easy to back off and not be the star. But she did.

EXCERPT FROM As I Am: An Autobiography, by Patricia Neal

It was April in 1959 when I heard from Arthur Penn, the director. He was casting William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, about the young Helen Keller. Everyone knew it was bound to be one of the biggest hits of the season and the vehicle of a lifetime for the actress who played Annie Sullivan, Helen's teacher.

The only problem was, Arthur was not offering me that part. He thought I would be wonderful as Helen's mother. It was not a starring role, but I hadn't done a play in the United States in four years or a film in three. I was in no position to command the star spot and I knew it. I could fantasize all I wanted, but if I was to keep working I would have to go with what was offered.

The star of Miracle Worker was Anne Bancroft. Like me, Anne had left Hollywood and returned to New York to make a new start. I first saw her at The Studio and admired her as an actress. Later I got to know her socially at the Strasberg parties. She was great fun and I liked her very much. Our paths were destined to cross many times.

We were in rehearsal only a few days when Anne and Arthur invited me for a drink. Arthur asked me quite candidly if I resented not playing the star role. I was equally candid. I admitted that I did, indeed, find it tough to step down, but I was trying my damndest to do it graciously. They breathed sighs of relief. Both of them thanked me for being honest and assured me they knew how difficult it was. I can truthfully say that the fact that I adored Anne and Arthur helped. I felt better than I had in days for having gotten it out. It was one of the happiest companies I ever worked with. It also afforded me a reunion with Phyllis Adams, of my pavement-pounding days. Phyllis was now married to George Jenkins, our set designer.

Near the end of rehearsals I saw Fred Cox, our producer, in the auditorium with a man and a woman. I couldn't see their faces from the stage, but the man kept waving at me. Finally I walked down the aisle to see who he was.

"Do you recognize me?" he asked with a tinge of wickedness. "We met in Chicago."

I searched the familiar face for a name.

"I'm the fellow you told not to go into show business."

"Oh yes," I said, nodding. "Michael ..."

Fred helped me out. "Nichols."

The woman with him, of course, was Elaine May.

I had gone six weeks without my family and we were just beginning out-of-town previews in Boston when Roald arrived with the girls. I could not wait to see my babies, and as they got off the elevator, I bellowed my welcome. Olvia looked at me with fright and Tessa let out a terrified wail. They obviously had no idea they were coming to see me and, in fact, did not seem to know why I had been absent from their lives for so long. I was annoyed with Roald for this oversight, but later, when all was well and we laughed it off, I scolded myself for making too much of it.

Eventually Roald came to the show. Following the performance, Arthur appeared at my dressing room. He was shaking with anger. "He's quite a fellow, that husband of yours. He doesn't think we have much of a play. Of course, he gave us his recommendations. We'd appreciate it if you'd see that he doesn't come again."

I was humiliated. And so angry that when Roald came backstage, I seethed. "This has nothing to do with you. Will you keep your fucking nose out of my business and let me make my own enemies!" We did not speak again about the progress of the play.

The Miracle Worker opened on October 19, 1959. Our reviews were as great as everyone hoped. Especially for Anne and little Patty Duke, who played Helen.

I got pregnant on opening night. Obviously Roald did not hold grudges.

Patty was older than the six-and-a-half-year-old Helen she portrayed on stage. I used to take her home with me and she was the perfect guest, completely charming and gracious. She loved to read stories to the girls, who adored her. Her visits spurred Olivia's pestering to come and see Mummy act for the first time. I arranged for Sonia to take her to a matinee but asked that she kept in the lobby during my first scene, fearing my frantic screams for my stage child might set up a howl from my own. After the performance, she looked at me very seriously and said, "I loved you, Mummy. You were jolly good." At that moment I didn't mind that Anne had gotten all the reviews. I had just gotten the most important notice of my life.

The Books: "Marilyn and Me" (Susan Strasberg)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Marilyn and Me, by Susan Strasberg

There is much to say here, about the smothering psychodrama of the Strasberg family - and the introduction of Lee Strasberg's most famous student - Marilyn Monroe - as practically an adopted daughter into the family.

Lee Strasberg had been one of the founding members of the Group Theatre in the 30s. It soon became clear that his gift was not in acting or in directing - but in teaching, and theorizing. People came to him for help with scenes - he was a close student of the Stanislavksy "system" (known, in its American version, as "the Method") - and he put his own spin on it very early on, by introducing what is known as "affective memory" [corrected!] into the pot.

"Sense memory" is when you, the actor, concentrate on creating, say, a coffee cup full of coffee. You work at it with your hands, you try to feel the weight of the cup, you try to feel the heat emanating, you try to create for yourself the smell of coffee. These exercises are meant to unleash the actor's creativity and imagination. The point of acting is to come alive under imaginary circumstances and for some actors that takes practice. Strasberg was always fascinated by those who did it anyway, who did it easily - who did it naturally, with no training. What was it in, say, Eleanora Duse - or Paul Muni - that was so authentic? Duse is famous for blushing on stage when a blush was called for (it was George Bernard Shaw who first noticed it and commented on it, how it seemed to him to be the purest example of imagination and creativity he had ever seen). Her sense of reality and being in-the-moment was so intense, so unshakeable, that she would blush. On cue. No one alive today has seen "Duse's blush" - any audience member from her time is now long dead - and yet the impression it made has remained famous, and you will still hear people reference "Duse's blush".

Strasberg wondered if such authenticity (which came natural to the geniuses of the world - the Duse's, the Brando's) could be taught. Could an actor train his concentration so that the world of the play would be so real that all kinds of involuntary things (like a blush) could be possible? The "affective memory" exercise that Strasberg developed is the most controversial aspect of the Method, and I have pretty mixed feelings about it (mainly because it didn't work for me). You go back in time (in your mind) to re-create a memory, something from your past ... trying to not just think about it, or remember it intellectually - but re-live it. This is not meant to be a general experience, a re-hashing of an old familiar narrative from your life - that would do you no good as an actor. The point is to use that concentration you have been training - on creating coffee cups and taking a shower and a hot humid day - in the services of resurrecting that old memory - but you do not do it by focusing on the emotions of the old memory, you do it by focusing on the sensory details. For example, one day when you were 6 years old, a phone call came, and your mother answered, and the news arrived that your beloved grandmother had died - and it was your first moment of grief, loss, fear, whatever ... It was an important moment. For "affective memory", you don't go straight for the jugular, and think about your grandmother dying. No. You focus on how the light looked on the kitchen tile that day, and the smell of breakfast on the stove ... the shoes your mother was wearing, the sound of the telephone ring ... and through focusing on those sensory details, you can get closer to the actual source of the memory. Because, of course, our bodies remember sensoral details better than it remembers actual information. You touch a hot stove once, you never do it again, to use an obvious example. Much of this is at a primitive level, an animal level ... but we, as complex intellectual creatures, tend to distance ourselves, or we forget ... But to quote Metallica: "the memory remains" - not in the brain, but in the sensoral apparatus at our disposal. I have been in classes where everyone is doing an "affective memory" at the same time and it is literally like sitting in the main room of a psych ward. People babble, weep, moan, talk out loud - some people freak out so badly they have to stop the exercise. Just because it never worked for me is not to say that it is not a useful exercise, or that some people were really set free by it. Actors are not cookie-cutters. We are all different.

For me, I certainly could do the exercise. It wasn't that I was blocked or anything like that. I could re-create anything. I live in a fantasy world half the time, anyway, this shit is old hat to me. The problem (for me) came when I had to "use" it in my acting. As an exercise it was fine, but I never seemed to use it when I was actually onstage acting. Now, much of the purpose of sense memory and effective memory IS just for training. It helps you hone your skills, it's a craft, you have to practice - it's like practicing giving yourself permission to enter an imaginary world. Sense memory helps you do that, and it also helps you to be specific, as opposed to general. Actors who are good are good because of all kinds of reasons - but actors who are bad all have one thing in common: They are GENERAL. Generality is death to good acting. But people working on sense memory DURING a scene had a tendency to look like they were in a fog, they were unable to connect with their scene partner, they were so busy creating the damn sound of rain on the windows. It had a tendency to look belabored. I would rather be an actor who is not, perhaps, transported to another dimension by a sense memory exericse - but is able to listen and talk in a believable manner onstage. However: it doesn't have to be either/or. It actually shouldn't be either/or. I ended up basically just using sense memory as strictly a training exercise - like practicing meditation ... which can be difficult. It was a way to leave the workaday everyday world, and surrender to the moment. It was about giving myself permission to be a little kid again. Again: this is not to say my experience is right. It was just my experience. Judging other people's acting processes is, to me, a little bit like judging how other people have sex. There cannot be a more pointless and idiotic way to spend your mental energy. If it works for someone, who are you to say it shouldn't? What kind of an arrogant insecure son-of-a-bitch are you anyway? But you see that a lot. Young actors, perhaps not as knowledgeable as they should be, try to assert their own process as THE way to do things. I have noticed this, too, with my friends who have become mothers. Other mothers can't just be like, "I do things THIS way with my baby - maybe that would work for you ..." They have to be like, "I do things THIS way with my baby, and if you DON'T do it that way, then you are abusive and selfish." It's retarded. So because Spencer Tracy didn't consciously sit around using sense memory, that means he's somehow lesser? How fucking condescending. You use it if you NEED it. But there can be a rigidity in acting training - because it's such an uncertain pursuit - there are no guarantees - and so actors (some actors) want to believe that there is only one way to do things, and if they could just "do it right", then all the glory in the world will follow.

There are also teachers out there who are charlatans - of the New Age Deepak Chopra variety - who insist that THEIR way is the only way, if you follow THEM you will succeed ... It's almost like a cult. Like, if you decide to switch teachers, or stop taking class altogether, it's seen as you leaving the fold, going beyond the pale. Acting careers, like any other, have pressures, and people are looking for the magic bullet, the golden goose, whatever it is.

My process usually involves music (I always have a "mix tape" for whatever show I'm in ... stuff that gets me into the world of the play) - and then just practical concerns - like learning my lines, and doing what the character does, whatever that may be. I like things like costumes ... they help set me free and launch me into another person's psyche as opposed to my own. Things like shoes are very important. How you walk, and how your feet feel ... it's something palpable, tangible. And then, I'm a huge fan of what I call the "Bang Bang You're Dead" school of acting. I go into that a bit here, in my piece on William Holden. Meaning: when a little kid is playing cops and robbers and shouts at his friend, "BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD", the other little kid will launch into a swandive of death more convincing than any seasoned actor could ever hope to accomplish. There is no gap between impulse and action, there is no questioning of "how" to do it ... You know that you have to die, and you have been shot, and so you throw your body into the void. Much of acting is remembering what it was like to be a child playing make-believe (at least it is for me) - when you are unselfconsciously in the world you have created ... and so much of my process involves doing whatever I have to do to get into that state. This (for me) never involved sense memory. Or, maybe I'm stating it too strongly. There were moments, yes, when it came in useful. Working on Summer and Smoke, and doing a scene that happens on a hot humid night, where the air sits there like soup, making you sluggish and tired. I would use sense memory for that ... to create the sensation of humidity, and still thick air. Often, though, it seemed to me that it came easier if I would just give myself the cue, the "Bang Bang Youre Dead" cue - only this time it was, "Hot Humid Night - GO" ... and, because I'm a human being, aware, and open, my senses would jump into action. I remember humidity. I didn't need to turn myself inside out to get there. However, that could just be a matter of practice and talent ... You don't always need to turn yourself inside out (and I very much disliked teachers who were suspicious of ease. Those people have a vested interest in you, the student, being in their thrall, of needing them ... so they keep you weak. They don't like ANYTHING to come easy.)

All of this is to say that Lee Strasberg was THE teacher of "The Method" for 20, 30 years - and even with the controversies, having ringing endorsements from people like Al Pacino did much to maintain his mystique (and the mystique of the Actors Studio- with which Strasberg was forever linked - as though they were one and the same).

Lee Strasberg remains a controversial figure (and his third and last wife Anna Strasberg even more so_, a very important man in American theatrical history, but there is no "official" version of him. Some people hated him, some loved him, some felt liberated by his teaching (Ellen Burstyn), some felt stifled. There is no right answer here.

But when we get into the Marilyn Monroe connection, things get even more murky. I have read both of Susan Strasberg's books (Marilyn and Me and Bittersweet) - and I have to say: they make me feel stifled. Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee and Paula Strasberg, was an actress. Because of who her parents were (and Paula had been an actress in the Group Theatre - she became Lee Strasberg's second wife - they had two children) - it was expected that she would go into the theatre, but it was also expected that she would study with her father, join the Actors Studio, take that route. They were unbelievably pushy parents. Or, Paula was pushy ... a very ambitious woman, bloated with her own thwarted dreams ... Paula was an acting coach herself (and she ended up having a very close relationship with Monroe - which caused all sorts of problems on movie sets - with Monroe deferring to PAULA'S judgment as opposed to the director's) ... and she wanted her daughter to thrive. However, I can't help but get the sense that she wanted her daughter to thrive on HER terms. She didn't REALLY want Susan to be free and independent. Whatever Susan had as an actress (and she had a pretty fine run!) would be OWNED by her parents. Just the thought of that makes me a little sick to my stomach.

Lee Strasberg was, famously, a very remote man. He was cut off, somewhere deep inside, and while he obviously had a gift of insight into acting - and into other people's processes - he wasn't as good with his own family. The house was always full of actors, all toadying up to Lee, and Susan grew up in that heady atmosphere, a little dark-haired girl on the sidelines, watching movie stars suck up to her father. Would there be room in that for HER? The thought of breaking free of her parents was unthinkable. They were too powerful. However, Susan started studying at the Actors Studio. Of course that meant that she was studying with her father - which, naturally, would make her freeze up ... If he treated her like he treated the other students (pushing at them, shouting at them, slicing through their defenses) ... how would she take that home with her? How would that affect their relationship? But even with these struggles, Strasberg started working. Very early. She got the role of Anne Frank in the Broadway production - she was just a teenager - and it was a giant smash hit. She was the toast of Broadway. Here's a picture of Susan from that time - and you can see, smiling above her - the mouth of Marilyn Monroe - one of the oddest things to see - because Marilyn Monroe is always the focus of any photo she is in. But here - in this case - she is not. It's Susan Strasberg's night.

She went on to minor success - playing Millie Owens in Picnic (a part with which I have many fond memories myself) and other roles.

Meanwhile, though, Marilyn Monroe had latched on to Lee Strasberg (and the feeling was mutual). Marilyn Monroe had moved to New York at the height of her career with two goals in mind: 1. To nab Arthur Miller and 2. To study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Monroe and Shelley Winters were great friends, and Winters had suggested that the Studio would be a good no-pressure place (ha!) for Monroe to go to work on her acting. She could take classes, have private sessions with Lee. Monroe would probably never get the chance to work on Nora in Doll's House (although I think she would have been wonderful in the part) - but there at the Studio she could.

Monroe dedicated herself to her classes at the Studio, and Strasberg very early on had some kind of connection to her. Perhaps he was enamored at the thought that this glamorous movie star had chosen him. Perhaps he was a little bit in love with her. Perhaps he had a Svengali complex. I think there was all of that going on. His devotion to Marilyn Monroe became paramount. He was more devoted to her than he was to his own children (at least that is how Susan and Johnny - the Strasberg's son - felt). Both of them had artistic ambition and dreams ... why couldn't their famous father stay focused on THEM?

Marilyn Monroe became ensconced in the Strasberg household. She and Lee would have hours-long sessions in his study, and she would emerge, unsteady on her feet, drained from weeping, and ready for a drink. Boundaries were blurred. Monroe slept over (as a matter of fact, she slept in the same room as Johnny - who was a 16 year old boy at the time - can you imagine the sexual confusion of that situation for him?) John, though, years later, would remember very movingly his first impressions of her, the biggest movie star in the world:

The first time I met her I remember she came out of the living room and Pop said, "This is my son," and my first impression of her was that she was different from most of the people who came to the house. I'd watch all these people trading their most human qualities, betraying themselves for success at all costs, to become rich and famous, and afterward, when it was too late, they'd realize they had lost the best part of themselves along the way, but she, she was like me. When I looked into her eyes, it was like looking into my own, they were like a child's eyes. I was still a child. You know how children just look at you. My feeling was she had less ego or was less narcissistic than most of the actors who never really bothered with me. She was just another person to me, another one from that world I felt cut off, excluded, from. She was nicer, real simple, no makeup, and she really looked at me as if she saw me. It wasn't that I wanted people to look at me, but I knew the difference when she did. I knew everyone said she was the sexiest, most sensual woman in the world. Not to me. I thought there was something wrong with me for not feeling that from her. I'd felt it from other women who came to the house. I was pretty sexually frustrated then. She was so open, so loose, and her sensuality as such was so totally innocent, nothing dirty in it at all, and the first time it was just like talking to an ordinary person, only realer than most who came into the house in those days. She was quiet, too, I remember, like an animal is quiet, and I was like that too, survival tactics. She seemed smart, but not in an educated way, instinctively smart, nobody's fool.

They had a special bond. She had a special bond with Susan as well, they were practically like sisters. They would sleep in in the mornings, lying in Susan's bed, talking about boys and makeup and life. As Susan Strasberg started getting important parts in plays that were truly relevant, Monroe was proud and happy for her - but jealous as well - since she had never been given the chance to do anything that would be "important". Monroe, like most brilliant comediennes and sex bombs, yearned to be taken seriously. Her relationship with the Strasbergs was deep, complex, disturbing to read about, and, frankly, a mess. Everyone was just trying to get their needs met. But her presence in the family messed up an already strained dynamic.

Monroe looked to Strasberg as a father figure, and if there were any sexual shenanigans (who knows, just speculating) Paula looked the other way. Paula insinuated herself into Monroe's life, becoming a constant companion. She, in lieu of Lee, would travel with Marilyn, going on her shoots with her, to work on the part privately, and have private sessions. Directors HATED her. They HATED her. She would stand behind them as they shot the scene, and the director would call "Cut" and Marilyn would not look at the director to see if it was good, she would glance over the director's shoulder to Paula. An insufferable situation. Paula Strasberg was banned from many sets. She was seen as interference. She got in the way of Marilyn doing good work - as opposed to the other way around. It was almost like (and this is my interpretation from all the reading I've done) that Paula's presence made Marilyn doubt herself. Marilyn was a huge talent. Yeah, she had problems memorizing lines (she probably was dyslexic) and had other issues ... but dammit, she knew how to be a movie star. Come on. She created that all on her own without the help of Paula Strasberg. In a cynical sense, I can see that Lee and Paula saw Marilyn as a possible gravy train (and the debacle with Marilyn's estate - a controversy to this day - is indicative of what perhaps they had hoped to happen). Lee Strasberg made his living through acting teaching. He was not a director, he was not an actor. So he wasn't a wealthy man. Marilyn Monroe was loaded, and willing to pay.

But I think, too, there was something in Marilyn that was, perhaps, weaker than other actresses - who also need to be coddled and told they are wonderful, etc. Marilyn Monroe yearned to be seen as a real actress, and Lee Strasberg, unlike most of the folks in Hollywood, saw it in her. He saw potential unlike anything he had ever seen before. I do think that part of it was genuine for him. He made her work on Anna Christie and Shakespeare. He made her work on Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses. He saw that Marilyn Monroe had a natural ability - rare indeed - to project herself, her personality, her soul - out into the open. Most actors need to be taught to do what she did naturally.

Regardless: the Strasberg involvement in Monroe's life was intense. It makes me stifled to read it. By the end of Marilyn's life, she was trying to cut the cords. It was not easy. It is never easy to change a dance step. To say to someone who is convinced that you need them: "Yeah, thanks, I got it now. I can do it on my own." Especially when there is a financial element to the relationship. They depended on Marilyn financially.

Anyway, books have been written about all of this. You could obviously look at it through many different lenses. Arthur Miller was furious at the Strasbergs for taking advantage of Marilyn, as he saw it. John Huston was like, "If I ever see that black bat [meaning Paula Strasberg] on my set ..."

The book Marilyn and Me is Susan's story - of trying to survive in that environment and carve out her own place. Even though her work was good and she was getting great reviews ... it didn't seem to win her parents' approval. They would drop everything if Marilyn called. And Marilyn - never a woman with rock-hard boundaries - seemed to not realize how much damage she did ... she couldn't help herself. She also loved the Strasbergs (all 4 of them, not just Paula and Lee). She loved them as the family she never had.

But boy. What a mess.

You can't wait for Susan and Johnny to move out and get on with their OWN lives. Interestingly enough, Marilyn seemed to sense that as well. She had a big sister role to the two younger Strasbergs, and sometimes (with her sensitivity) could see what the situation was clearer than any insider could. John Strasberg (who has gone on to be an amazing director and teacher - I took a workshop with him and he blew me away) tells a beautiful story about Marilyn, one of my favorites:

I think I was talking about cars to Mother and Father. You know how I loved cars. I'd just come home and it was going to be my eighteenth birthday. I'd wanted to come for that.

Mother and Father hadn't wanted me to come. "Why don't you wait till the end of the year?" Well, i'd already been kicked out of college. They didn't know yet.

When I'd gone off at the airport, I'd turned to Mother and said, "For two cents, I won't go." Nobody gave me the two cents, but I'd meant it. What I'd wanted to do was work. I'd wanted to work from the time I was fifteen, and they were always against any effort on my part to be strong or independent. I remember how much I resented it. "You don't have to work, we'll take care of everything," undermining me.

So I was talking about cars, no one was listening, and Marilyn was there and out of the blue said, "Why don't you take my car, Johnny?"

I thought I hadn't heard her right, and I said, "What?" She had remembered the summer before, in California, I'd had that Chevy I'd rented. God, I loved that car, a '57 Bel Air silver Chevy, and she had the Thunderbird.

She continued, "I've got the Ford Mustang the corporation gave me, and Arthur and I have a car. That one's just sitting in the garage, we don't use it."

I was stunned. I couldn't believe she meant it.

Mother and Father were horrified; they didn't like it at all. I don't know if it felt like too much to give me or if they were worried about my driving in my state of mind, but they objected strenuously. "He's too young. Maybe later, Marilyn. You don't have to. It's impossible, he can't afford it, it could be dangerous."

Marilyn just said, "Well, don't worry about any of that, it's in the corporation's name, so I'll take care of the insurance."

I'll never forget that ... There were so few, so very few people who were generous like that. Especially to me, who couldn't do anything for her.

I think that car saved my life.

It was a family, what can you say. A makeshift one, with all kinds of weirdness - described by Susan. When Susan was in Anne Frank on Broadway she was 16, 17 ... and she started an affair with the married Richard Burton, who was also on Broadway at the time. It was her first love. Paula Strasberg was Susan's mother. Instead of being either scared for her daughter, or judgmental - she was thrilled. What a great opportunity for her daughter - to lose her virginity to one of the biggest stars of the stage! I mean, I'm coarsening it - but Paula was so excited - had Burton over to the house, let him sleep in Susan's bed, and made sure that Susan was well-versed in all things birth control. Paula was a woman who, in the 30s, had been a blonde buxom fraulein-type girl, a committed Socialist, and a good actress. Years would destroy her. She was obese by the 50s, and dressed only in black, with a black scarf draped over her head like a bubushka. She had had dreams, of course, she had been at the forefront of the American theatre for a brief decade and life seemed to pass her by. She had married the ultimate acting coach ... and who knows ... I think there were a lot of issues there. If you read books about the Group Theatre, you meet Paula as one kind of person ... then you read the books about Marilyn Monroe, and another person entirely emerges. She was despised by those who loved and cared about Monroe. She was like a leech, a bloodsucker ... and she restricted access to Monroe, isolating Monroe from the world. You had to go through her. So who knows - I don't feel qualified to weigh in on who Paula actually was - I can only guess.

But Susan Strasberg experienced her mother as bossy, intrusive, strangely passive around her husband, and a woman who was full of mystical thoughts about signs, messages, portents ... She had a sense of destiny. Marilyn Monroe came along, and it was the most exciting thing that had happened to the family.

Susan loved Marilyn Monroe. She considered her to be her best friend.

Here are the two of them, sitting in one of Lee Strasberg's classes.

But it must have seemed kind of like a dream - those years of the 50s into the 60s ... those years when Marilyn Monroe came to stay with us ... She was such a big star. Such a troubled woman. I happen to think she was a wonderful actress - but there was something in the Strasbergs that, yes, made her go deeper into her work - but also stymied her, made her stuck. I don't take the condescending snotty view that Marilyn Monroe working on Shakespeare is silly because why would she ever be cast in such plays? That's the whole point of training. That's the whole point of the Actors Studio, actually: a place where you can work on things outside of commercial considerations. But like I mentioned: all the boundaries got blurred, and Monroe started being nervous about making a choice in her acting, ANY choice, without running it by the Strasbergs first.

Must have been quite an ego trip for them, but that may be a cynical interpretation.

Marilyn and Me is not well-written. It is the definition of conventional prose, which makes me believe that Susan wrote every word. If it was better written, I might suspect she had some outside help. The text is interspersed with long bits where people who knew Marilyn tell what they remembered - Susan Strasberg had obviously gone around getting people on tape for the purposes of the book. The anecdotes are fascinating. Actually, the whole book is fascinating. The picture that emerges of Marilyn Monroe is absolutely 100% three-dimensional. She was not an evil witch-woman who stole Strasberg's parents. It was like Monroe went back to her years in the foster care system, and joined the family for a time. She was clearly a grownup but she was a good friend to the two young ones, too. She was a movie star, completely in control of her persona, absolutely in love with her own fame ... but she was also a woman who still woke up from nightmares of her time in the orphanage ... and who dreamt, wistfully, of being in a play like The Diary of Anne Frank - of having the critics and the public ACCEPT her as a serious actress.

Monroe said to Susan Strasberg once:

“Being a most serious actress is not something God has removed from my destiny as He chooses to destroy my chances of being a mother. It’s therefore my perogative to make the dream of creative fulfillment come true for me. That is what I believe God is saying to me and is the answer to my prayers.”

This has been an unearthly long entry, but I obviously have a lot of thoughts about the Strasbergs. I have been studying them, as a family, since I was 12 years old and decided that the Actors Studio was where I needed to be. My main response to the book (besides the revelatory anecdotes about Marilyn) is: Sheesh. Thank God I wasn't in that family.

Here's an anecdote from when Marilyn first started taking classes with Lee.

EXCERPT FROM Marilyn and Me, by Susan Strasberg

Pop and Marilyn decided that she would observe at the studio, work with him at home, sit in on the private classes and eventually do the exercise work and scenes with the other students. Observer privileges at the studio were a courtesy that was extended to foreign or already established actors. Some came once, like Laurence Olivier; others came often.

My father had gone out of his way for both known and unknown artists before, if they were needy, financially or emotionally, and if they were talented. He said that often the depth of the emotional problem was correspondent to the degree of talent. He was fascinated with the transmutation of antisocial behavior into creative work. Because of this, he was accused of doing therapy. One student and friend remarked, "Lee, you should have been a therapist."

He shook his head. "Why, darling? I have more freedom in my work."

He sent numerous actors to psychiatrists, and many doctors sent their patients to class because they felt his work helped theirs in analysis.

He felt Marilyn had to go into therapy before he could work with her. She'd seen doctors before only on a hit-and-run basis, emergency room therapy with no continuity. Now she agreed to commit on a long-term basis.

After a day of teaching, my dad was usually too exhausted to talk, and even when he wasn't exhausted, he wasn't exactly a magpie. Now, three times a week after work he and Marilyn disappeared into the living room. Soon I'd hear laughing or weeping, sometimes an outburst of anger, a diatribe against her studio or someone who'd betrayed her trust. She was very unforgiving during these bouts, it was all ablack and white for her. People were either for her or against her, there was no middle ground. If she even suspected they were against her, and she could be very suspicious, she'd go wild. I don't know if "those bastards ... sons of bitches ..." and so on were ever told off in person, but if they were, I doubt they would have ever forgotten it. And she didn't stutter once.

Her scatological language fascinated me. My parents rarely cursed in private. You didn't say certain words in public, it just wasn't done. Others could do it, but we didn't except my brother, who refused to obey the unspoken rules. "Hypocrites!" he'd yell at my parents. "Goddamned hypocrites!"

Marilyn's vocabulary included words I'd never ever heard of, and she wielded them like a sailor, with no embarrassment. She had quite a temper when she lost control. It didn't faze my father, perhaps because he was always battling his own prodigious rage, which more than matched hers. He seemed to have a calming effect on her. Her tirade would evaporate and, as if nothing had occurred, they'd be speaking quietly about very personal matters - men, her mother, her feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness. It was such a stark contrast to the way she behaved with me. I could hardly believe it was the same woman.

When I overheard snatches of these sessions I'd get excited with a sense of being part of something forbidden. As if I were a sieve, I'd feel her emotions run through me. If she cried, tears came to my eyes.

On the other hand, I was ambivalent about the tenderness I heard in my dad's voice as he consoled her. When I'd gone to my father to talk about something personal in my life - my fights with Mother, my need for more freedom, a young man I'd been dating who never called me any more - he closed up. "Darling, I'm not concerned with that except as it relates to the work." It was true, mine weren't life-or-death problems, but they felt that way to me, and he acted as if they were so trivial he couldn't be bothered. I wanted to cry out to him, "I don't care about the work. I'm young, I want to have a good time. I don't want to suffer or be in pain, I want you to help me. I want you to hold me." The words lodged in my throat, and I couldn't say anything.

Another thing confused me - given that my middle name was confusion. It confused me to observe the attention and time my father devoted to Marilyn. It began to dawn on me that there was some connection between them that went beyond the work. She was so different from the classic actresses he spoke of with glowing admiration, the actresses he admired - Rachel, the great French tragedienne, whom I looked like; Eleonora Duse, whom he'd seen and whom he believed was the greatest actress that had ever lived. He advocated willpower and structure and discipline. Marilyn seemed such an unlikely disciple. Her work and life seemed the antithesis of everything he stood for to me. Was he in love with her? I didn't think so. But he was practically a stranger to me. In some ways our entire family were intimate strangers. I wondered if my mother was jeaous of the time he gave to Marilyn.

"She's not your father's type, you know," Mom confided.

"My type is Jennifer Jones, that dark-haired, fair-skinned beauty," Pop affirmed.

"It's her talent he loves," Mother assured herself. "She's so incredibly talented." Then she wondered whether I should darken my hair and eyebrows for a more glamorous look. Eventually I did and, when I saw the photos of myself, dark and dramatic, I realized with a shock that I resembled a young Jennifer Jones.

Someone who'd known Pop from the Group Theatre days was reminiscing to me: "There were two things we knew about Lee. He loved baseball and Alice Faye." Alice Faye was a blonde like Marilyn, like my mother. Maybe my father didn't have a type.

Even when Marilyn wasn't physically present, she often monopolized the conversation. My father was unaccustomedly verbal about her. After dinner one night he told us, "She has this phenomenal sensitivity, her instrument is incredibly responsive. Despite the bad mannerisms and habits she may have acquired in Hollywood, and with all the abuse she was subjected to, they haven't touched what is underneath. It's difficult because you have to look past what she looks like to see what's hidden. She had to hide it or she'd have been too vulnerable to survive, and she's so eager and willing, as if she's a flower that's been waiting all this time for someone to water her."

There was this strange constriction in my throat as he continued. Was it boredom, or was it resentment? He never talked about me with that look in his eyes. He wasn't finished either; he went on to say, "After Marlon, she has the greatest talent, raw talent, that I've ever come across, except in her it's just not at all developed. But she has the desire. And if she has the discipline, the will, she can do it."

Early one evening Marilyn had finished a particularly grueling session wtih Pop. We were waiting for dinner, which we ate around six-thirty, and she'd borrowed some of my makeup to fix up her face because she'd been crying. She was unusually relaxed and pleased about whatever they'd done. We were in my bedroom and I sprawled on my bed, watching her apply my rouge and mascara, the only makeup I used.

As she began to talk to me, she seemed to be talking to herself, too. Her voice was hushed but clear. "I thought your father would be so forbidding, I was terrified the first time I was alone with him in there. But he wasn't scary at all. Gadge [Elia Kazan, the director], a lot of people told me he was scary, but I think they just didn't want me to see him. Susie, the best thing that ever happened to me was when your father took me seriously. I've always wanted for people to see me, not the actress, the real person. Your daddy does. He treats me like I'm a human being. I was so sick of being treated like a poster babe or a broad out there. Everybody laughed when I said I wanted to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, like I was a dummy. They were the dummies. If they'd bothered to read the book, they'd know she was this sensual girl, a barmaid. I could really have played her."

She turned to look at me. "You know why I make fun of myself? So I'll do it before they do. That way it's not so bad, doesn't hurt so much. It's either commit suicide or laugh." She had this pensive look on her face, as if she were figuring something out.

Daylight was fading fast, and she switched on the lamp near the mirror. "And you know, since your daddy's given me his stamp of approval, other people are suddenly changing their tune. Only I'm not sure they believe it like he does."

Inside I was dying. I'd been one of those people who'd looked down at her aspirations. Thank God she couldn't read my mind.

In a stream of consciousness her voice flowed on. "I worked with this woman in California for years. She taught me, educated me, like your father, gave me books to read, but even she thought I was a dummy. He doesn't, and the most important thing is, with your father for the first time I feel it's OK to be me, the whole kit and caboodle, you know, the whole mess.

"I never dared to even think about it before - who's got time to think when you gotta survive? But now I want to be an artist, pardon the expression, a real actress. I don't care about the money and the fame, although I'm not knocking it, but like the man says, 'Life's not written on dollar bills,' right? Since I came here to New York, I feel I'm accepted, not as a freak, but as myself, whoever the hell that is. I'm kind of just finding out."

She was so open, her face flowing with fervor and longing. I felt glad for her, and I wondered if this was what my father was drawn to - this longing of hers.

She turned off the makeup light, and then, almost as if she'd made a discovery, she continued, "You know, for the first time in a long time I feel that something good is going to come out of my life ... and I'm beginning to think that the something good is me. I know your father's really going to help me. You don't know how lucky you are." I assumed she meant to have a father like that, and I was a little embarrassed on general principles and just nodded agreement.

It was dark in the room now, and we sat, unable to see each other's faces, lost in our own thoughts. Faint notes of some lyrical strains of flute music drifted in the air. The sweet-sour aroma of red cabbage and brisket made my mouth water.

Listening to her had reminded me of this story about an agent who sold a producer on this actress, saying she'd stop the show if he cast her. On opening night she did stop the show and got a standing ovation. The agent turned to the producer triumphantly. "You see, I told you she was great, and now I believe it."

Marilyn seemed like the agent before the ovation, hoping for the best yet not convinced.

It amazed me that she was so much older, had achieved so much, yet she was just as insecure as, maybe even more insecure than, me. She had won my complete admiration for one thing: she wasn't scared of my father, not even a little bit. I determined I'd watch her closely so I could learn her secret.

The Books: "Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words : Marilyn Monroe's Revealing Last Words and Photographs" (George Barris)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words : Marilyn Monroe's Revealing Last Words and Photographs, by George Barris

George Barris claims that these were the last photographs of Mariliyn Monroe before she died. Bert Stern claims that his photos (the ones of Marilyn lying naked in bed, drinking champagne) are the last photos of Marilyn Monroe. Neither are correct. There was actually another photo shoot that was her last. The competition to be the "last" with Marilyn is intense ... her last moments, the phone calls, the meetings, have been narrowed down to the second ... as though something in the banal could reveal her state of mind, or her intention. The 'myth' of Marilyn can obscure her. I have always loved Marilyn Monroe, and while, of course, the "myth" affects me - it's like osmosis - you can't really help it ... I have always been interested in getting beyond the myth. Not so much in terms of knowing her biographical details (which will always be murky with Monroe) - that doesn't interest me as much - but in understanding her as an actress: her struggles, her commitment, what she was good at, what she knew she had to work at - her fights with the studio, her negotiating power and how she used it - her work at the Actors Studio and what that was all about for her ...

Since I first saw Marilyn Monroe on television in Some Like It Hot, I've thought: "Who the hell is that luscious woman and why is she so damn FUNNY??" Her funniness can often be skated over, as can her dramatic ability - just because of her looks, and the va-va-voom nature of her persona. I mean, I know it's understood that she was a marvelous comedienne, but still: I think the "myth" tends to override everything else, until it is hard to believe that this was, you know, a real woman, an actress, a person like any other. The myth had already begun when she was alive. She was the biggest female star in the world. An international phenomenon.

The pressure began very early to have her appear in certain kinds of parts ... and the studio often punished her by putting her in projects unworthy of her - not only unworthy of her talent, but unworthy of her stature as a giant star. There were those in power who thought she was a whore who just got lucky. Now, not everyone felt this way. She had powerful friends. She knew how to shmooze and get what she needed. And once you were a trusted ally of Monroe, you were a trusted ally forever. There were agents and directors who went to bat for her, who tried to protect her ... but, once you look at the whole of her life - and the decisions she made - you begin to realize that the myth of Marilyn - as one of the greatest victims of all time - was actually nothing of the sort. Sure, she had some bad things happen to her (again, I'm talking career-wise), some hard knocks - but once you delve into the details, you really can see her as a businesswoman, her own career manager - playing hardball with the big boys. She was no victim. I've always been a bit annoyed by that characterization of her.

At the height of her career, she refused to do a couple of pictures, because she didn't like the material. She was put on suspension, as though she were a recalcitrant child. She didn't care. She moved to New York City at that time, and started taking acting classes at the Actors Studio. I am trying to imagine one of our most giant stars behaving in that way today. How refreshing it would be! She knew she needed to grow as an actress, and there was no way she could do so if she relied on the studio to put her in challenging projects. So she took charge. In the mid-50s, the Studio was THE place to be - having turned out stars such as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and others. Monroe put herself on the line, her reputation, knowing that there were those in the Studio who sneered at her ("big movie star trying to be a serious actress ...") - and began to study, taking acting classes, doing scenes, working on Eugene O'Neill and others. At the same time, she formed her own production company - another thing relatively unheard of at that time. An actress trying to have control over her own destiny? Who does she think she is? She should be grateful that we let her act at all! Make no mistake: that vibe was present in the studio, and it was reflected in her low-balled salary and the projects they put her in.

She gave a press conference in New York, announcing her move to New York and the creation of her new production company. The joint was mobbed, photographers and journalists clamoring to the microphones to shout questions at her. She was quite open about how unhappy she was in Hollywood, and had no hesitation in saying so. She said she didn't like the projects that had been coming her way - she wanted people to know she was more than just her body and her glamorous image - she wanted people to know that she was a real actress. She announced that she wanted to develop The Brothers Karamazov for the screen. One of the reporters called out, "Do you even know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?" Look at that. Look at that open contempt. This was something Marilyn faced every day. So she must have been used to it because she replied calmly, "Have you read the book? There's a character in it named Grushenka - she's a real seductress - and I think it would be a great part for me." Marilyn, you've got more class in your pinky toe than any of those folks looking down on you, and her calm (yet pointed) response to the reporter is one I really admire. "Have you read the book?" That's really all you need to say to some bigot who tries to put you down.

Unfortunately, her "Grushenka" never came to fruition - but I share that anecdote because it shows Marilyn's business smarts. She always had it. She was one of those rare rare stars who is chosen by the public to be famous. I've written my theories about such people before - the Julia Roberts-es, the Tom Cruise-es, There is something indestructible about the fame of these people (well, until one of them leapt on a certain couch and made history). But let me get back to my point: You can feel when the industry is trying to MAKE a star. The best example I can think of is when Vanity Fair put Gretchen Mol on their cover 10-odd years ago.

Mol obviously had powerful people behind her, and everyone wants to be the one to take credit for finding "the next hot thing". But the backlash from that cover ("who does she think she is?" "Who the hell is Gretchen Mol and why are her hardened nipples staring at me from the magazine rack??") was acute. Her WORK had not yet even been seen in a wide way, and so the cover was perceived (by many in the industry as well as by the public) as pushy, too-much-too-soon (even Mol has said that about the cover - her career was delicate, she had done a couple of indie movies, and the level of scrutiny the cover brought her was WAY too much) - She hadn't even done any movies yet that had any real kind of buzz (out in the larger world, I mean, outside the boundaries of Hollywood) ... and so trying to CREATE the buzz backfired. (Sometimes that ploy will work, but Mol, a lovely actress, is really representative of how it can NOT go over well). The question on the Vanity Fair cover was a mistake, in my opinion: "Is she Hollywood's next 'It' girl?" The answer came back - from Hollywood and the public (who had never heard of Mol, and many of her movies weren't even playing in most cineplexes in America - it was strictly an "insider's" cover) - a resounding "No."

But with someone like Julia Roberts: her fame took even her own agent by surprise. Yes, she was being groomed for good stuff ... she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Steel Magnolias (Julia now says that she sees that as one of those polite "welcome to the business" nominations - as opposed to anything with more fire behind it) - and she was already playing leads. But she was on location for Sleeping With the Enemy when Pretty Woman opened - she hadn't even done publicity for the film!! It wasn't thought that it would be necessary. Can you imagine?? Pretty Woman had its opening weekend, and Roberts, on location in South Carolina, had no idea the BROU HAHA that had broken loose. This is pre-Internet days, pre-blackberry days ... If you were out of town, you were most decidedly out of town. Her agent called her and said, "Do you have any idea what is happening right now?" When Roberts came back to Hollywood after her shoot, she was the biggest box-office star in the world. It was a true Cinderella story. And it was the PUBLIC who did that, the PUBLIC who screamed, "WE WANT MORE OF HER." It took the industry by surprise. Best kind of fame.

I want to make it clear that I am not really talking about "talent" here. There are plenty of fantastic actresses out there who are doing work superior to Julia Roberts. What I'm talking about is fame. And whether or not you like Julia Roberts is irrelevant to what actually happened to her back in the early 90s. It was one of those rare rare things: a public-driven phenomenon. It's not that Gretchen Mol is less of an actress. It's that the industry was trying to create something with her before it was time, before she had "the role", before she had even "hit". Julia Roberts "hit" all on her own. The amount of good will that that generated towards Julia Roberts is still in evidence today. That's what I mean when I say there is something "indestructible" about that kind of fame. If you play it right, you can ride that wave for a long long time.

If you look at some of the choices Roberts made in the wake of her stardom - it's incredible. She, like Monroe, was unhappy with all of the Pretty Woman II scripts she was being offered. So she didn't make a movie FOR TWO YEARS. I mean, the balls!! She had made Dying Young and Sleeping with the Enemy - but these were both filmed before the firestorm of the opening of Pretty Woman. Both films opened on the heels of Pretty Woman, which gave the illusion that they were now "Julia Roberts Pictures" - but they weren't - not yet. The Julia Roberts acting in those films was unaware that the genie in the bottle was about to be released. In 1991, the year after Pretty Woman came out, she was Tinkerbell in Hook which amounted to maybe a week of work - but other than that, she stopped working immediately following her giant breakthrough. This is unheard of. But I think Roberts was smart. Probably at the time it felt crazy to her, and I know that her agent was pulling her hair out, begging Roberts to get back to work - to do something - ANYTHING - to remind the public of why they had loved her so much in Pretty Woman. But Roberts remained firm. I'm convinced that that is one of the reasons she is still such an enormous star. She's her own person. She would not be manipulated. From very early on, she refused to do nude scenes. Even in Pretty Woman, where you would think it would be par for the course, she refused. Contract negotiations were stalled because Roberts refused to take her top off. No, no, no, she would not do it. Garry Marshall obviously wanted her badly enough that he caved. They compromised - she did one scene in her panties, so there is the impression that she is nude, but she actually is not. To this day, Roberts has never done a nude scene. But the important thing about this whole story is that before she was famous she knew her limits, and she wasn't afraid to say "no". In such a soulless world as Hollywood, where people are willing to do anything, anything, to be famous - even if it means contradicting their own ideals for themselves - this is rare. And I think that, too, goes a long way towards explaining the Julia Roberts phenomenon. People GET that about her. To be clear (yet again): I don't think doing nude scenes is a bad thing, and I don't judge anyone who makes that choice. I was nude onstage once. Whatever, it was important to the part. I didn't have to spout lines that told the audience I was a manipulative trashy person with ZERO boundaries. The nudity did it all for me. It was great. Embarrassing at first, but eventually no big deal. I like Shelley Winters' quote about nudity: "I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience." hahahaha But Roberts didn't feel right about it, and she stuck to her guns.

I happen to love Julia Roberts, and I know she has her detractors. My point in all of this, though, is to demonstrate the power and strength of a star who is chosen by the public, as opposed to by the industry. There's just something untouchable about that kind of fame.

This is what happened to Marilyn Monroe, who started out as a starlet in a line of starlets, indistinguishable from any of the rest. Of course what WAS distinguishable was her drive, her desire to be not only famous but GOOD, to be a "real actress". Her performance in Don't Bother to KNock (my review here) is proof that Marilyn was not just whistling into the wind with her ambition, there was real talent there, and a real capability for true dramatic expression. But that was not what was wanted of her. What "hit" with the public was her giggly bubbly sex goddess, the kind-hearted innocent woman who also had the body of a pin-up. Powerful directors pulled her out of obscurity and gave her small things to do ... Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve ... and somewhere along the line the publicity department at the studio decided to put their power behind this new blonde starlet, and they went into overdrive, putting her in photo shoots that appeared in Life magazine - and the fan mail started pouring in. People loved her. Who knows what they sensed ... but they wanted more. When the nude photos she had done earlier in her life came to light, a shitstorm erupted. It was scandalous, horrible - and many of those in charge at the studios wanted her to apologize, to be contrite. Marilyn refused. She made a statement acknowledging that yes, that was her in the photos, and no, she wasn't sorry, because her rent had been due and she had no money, and she was desperate. This was not at all what the studio bigwigs wanted her to say - but imagine their surprise - the public overwhelmingly supported her. The publicity department was bombarded with sacks and sacks of mail from all over the world - women AND men (that was another key element of her appeal: women loved her and wanted to be like her, men desired her and wanted to protect her - if you have that kind of cross-gender appeal, then it is your OWN fault if you don't capitalize on it - because it is rare rare rare - Julia Roberts has the same thing) - and the letters all said the same thing: "We love this girl!" Her honesty shone through. People respect honesty. What Monroe's detractors had hoped would be her downfall (you know, the ones who had the sneering, "She's just a whore who got lucky" attitude) ended up being one of her biggest triumphs. THAT'S the power of a public-driven stardom. The industry was ready to cut her loose. As far as they concerned, she was a dime a dozen. But she wasn't. In Marilyn Monroe's case, the public ALWAYS knew better than the industry.

George Barris, the author of this book, interviewed Marilyn extensively and took the famous photos of Marilyn playing in the surf in Santa Monica, drinking champagne, cavorting on the beach in an orange bathing suit. Monroe had only a month or so left to live. She had already been fired from Something's Got to Give, and was eloquent about what she thought had happened. She comes off, here, as lucid, sweet, and determined. I feel like any book about Marilyn Monroe has to be taken with a grain of salt - there is soooo much to gain by saying, "Hey, I spoke with Marilyn Monroe and here is what she said" - that I am suspect of mostly everything. But this is a beautiful volume, glossy, Marilyn's words on various topics interspersed with Barris' photographs. I love the Barris photographs because many of them feel candid. It seems like he just turned his camera on her and "caught" her, behaving. She's wearing a little bit of eye makeup, but nothing much else. She jumps and laughs and seems to be talking right at the camera, at times ... They have a wonderful vibe, and capture, to me, what I feel is Monroe's essence. Yes, she was damaged, and insecure, and frightened, and (ironically) sexually frigid. All of that is true. But she was also a nature-loving beach girl, a woman who was funny, and who loved funny people. Also: she LOVED the camera, and the camera LOVED her. (I wrote a post called Marilyn and the Camera which has some great quotes from photographers who had worked with her). She was beyond being photogenic. She was magic, and she created that magic for herself. It was like a button was pushed in her when that camera was pointed her way, and she came to life. It was what she did. It made her happy, and you can tell that that is true in the photographs Barris took of her that day on the beach.

Barris keeps the narration to a minimum. Occasionally he interjects with explanatory footnotes, but most of the text is Marilyn speaking. She talks about her childhood, her mentally ill mother, her marriage as a teenager, Joe DiMaggio, her acting, John Huston, the nude calendar, etc. etc. Again, a grain of salt is needed here ... but even that being said, this is a beautiful book. A coffee table book, I guess - and the photos are haunting. You can hear her laughter mixed with the crashing surf.

I chose an excerpt where Marilyn talks about various different topics, nothing too deep or personal ... just her own preferences in life.

EXCERPT FROM Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words : Marilyn Monroe's Revealing Last Words and Photographs, by George Barris

On Aging: Women as they grow older should take heart. They've gained in wisdom. They're really silly when they are twenty.

Carl Sandburg, who's in his eighties - you should see his vitality, what he has contributed. Why, he could play the guitar and sing at three in the morning - I like him very much.

On Food, Fragrance, and Flowers: I love food as long as it has flavor. It's flavorless food I can't stand. I usually have a steak and a green salad for my dinner, also for breakfast when I'm really hungry. I keep away from pastries - I used to love them, and ice cream, too. I skip all desserts unless it's fruit. I just don't like the taste of pastries As a kid I did, but now I hate it - and as for candy, I can take it or leave it, usually leave it. But I love champagne - just give me champagne and good food, and I'm in heaven and love. That's what makes the world go round.

I like different scents of perfume, beside Chanel No. 5.

My favorite flower is the delphinium. Roses, any color, are [among my] favorites, too.

On Traveling: I like getting there, not the actual traveling itself. I've never been to Italy, but I love Italians. Paris I hear is a marvelous plae - the city of lights. It must be beautiful; I hope someday to go there and all these other exciting places.

I've traveled to England, Korea, Japan, and Mexico. I've been to Canada, too - when I made the film River of No Return, in 1953. We were on location in the Canadian Rockies and Banff. Did you know I almost drowned in the Bow River, when the icy torrent dragged me downstream? I also tore a ligament in my ankle when I tripped over a rock in the river. They had to put me in a cast for ten days when my ankle swelled badly. Now I can laugh about it, but it wasn't funny then. Imagine, this was my contact with nature - poor little me. A big-city girl, drenched, half drowned, and crippled, crushed by the wilderness. But if you remember the picture, I rode a log raft down the rapids. It sure was beautiful country. Oh, yes, how can I ever forget Canada?

On Television and Movies: The only time I watch television is for the news program or for a good movie. I'm not what you'd call a TV fan. I was going to do Somerset Maugham's Rain - the Sadie Thompson role. I find it an exciting one, but the deal fell through. I wanted Lee Strasberg, my drama coach, to direct me in it, but NBC wanted an experienced TV director. I think it can be an exciting movie for the big screen - I believe in movies. Everyone should get out of their house once in a while - not just sit around with their socks on.

On Acting and Actors: When anyone asks me for advice on how to become an actress, the only advice I feel qualified to give is only through my own experience. So here goes: Always be yourself. Retain individuality; listen to the truest part of yourself. Study if you can. Get a good teacher. Believe in yourself. Have confidence, too.

I have favorite motion-picture stars, like everyone else. You know who mine are? My favorite is Marlon Brando. I mean, really, I believe we'd be an interesting combination. I've said that about Marlon for a long time, but we haven't found the right story. Can you imagine us on the big screen? I hope something happens soon.

Greta Garbo, I've never met her. It really bugs me when I miss one of her films on TV. Oh, if you could only get me to meet her! I've also heard wonderful things about Jeanne Eagels and Laurette Taylor. And the one they called the Blond Bombshell: Jean Harlow. Kay Kendall was a great comedian. She was really talented.

I would have loved working with Gerard Philipe, the handsome French star - his films I've been told were a huge success in France, as were his stage plays. I was told he wanted to make films with me. Oh, what a shame we never got the opportunity. We would have made an interesting team. What a shame. He was so young to die; he was thirty-six. He had been ill and apparently died of a heart attack.

On Marilyn: Those things the press has been saying about me [are fine] if they want to give the wrong impression. It's as simple as all that. I'm not interested in being a millionaire. The one thing a person wants most in life is usually something basic money can't buy. I'm not the girl next door - I'm not a goody-goody - but I think I'm human.

The Books: "Timebends: A Life" (Arthur Miller)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

This is truly bizarre. Today happens to be Arthur Miller's birthday. His is the next book on the shelf. So happy birthday, Arthur Miller.

When Timebends came out, in 1987, I remember there being mixed reviews. I think mainly folks were expecting salacious revelations about Marilyn Monroe - and the book decidedly does not deliver on that score. But why does it not deliver? Because Marilyn Monroe was not some unearthly sexual goddess to Arthur Miller. She was a real girl, sweet, troubled, innocent, lovely - and she was his wife. He does not take us into their bedroom, and he does not "explain" her. She can't be "explained" by one person alone, and it is not up to Miller to interpret her for us. The Marilyn sections of the book are very lovely - I loved the picture of her that emerged ... but it's certainly not the whole book, it is not even the context in which the entire book is placed. It is an event, like any other ... something that made up a good deal of his emotional life for some time, as well as his creative life (as he tried to write material that would show the world she was a "real actress"). (Once upon a time I put together a giant post called "The Making of The Misfits" - filled with photos and book excerpts about that troubled film-shoot. The whole thing really had began as Miller's desire to write something he felt Marilyn could do, something worthy of her.) But in general, the Marilyn in the book is revealed as a real person, maybe more beautiful than most, certainly more famous ... but a woman with anxieties, quirks, and a lovely sense of humor and intellect that he found captivating.

Additionally, there is a lot of politics in the book (which is also not surprising) - and in many ways it gives a grand sweeping look at the journey of the American Left from the 30s to the 50s ... well, and yes, into the 60s - but by then many of the definitions had changed. Miller was from New York, and had grown up going to see productions at the Group Theatre, that bastion of the American Left, and had been gobsmacked by Clifford Odets' fiery language, and the vision that theatre could be somehow relevant and revolutionary. His compassion for the downtrodden, the persecuted, the forgotten masses could be seen as radical (and it certainly was at the time) - yet at the same time he had great contempt for the Soviet system of oppression and censorship, and worked hard through his life to support the persecuted writers in the Soviet bloc. And while he had seen the downside to American capitalism in his own family misfortunes, he was also amazed during the groundbreaking production of Salesman in Beijing in 1983 - which took China by storm. I actually remember some of the news reports about that production trickling down to me in junior high. I had read Salesman by then, so I knew of it ... but that production can be seen, in certain lights, as a watershed moment in China's cultural history. People went NUTS for Salesman in China. They had gone NUTS for Salesman in America in the 1940s and there, 50 years later, in a Communist country, they went nuts again. Even more nuts. Miller was amazed by the response. The curtain would go down at the end of the production, and Chinese men in suits would be hugging one another in the aisles, weeping. Amazing. It had spoken to them, to their experience, their hopes and dreams - another culture, another political system - none of that mattered. The message of Salesman, of the inherent dignity of man, despite his financial success, had a deep deep resonance for the Chinese. Salesman traveled, in other words. John Updike shares an interesting anecdote about Miller, which, I think, might surprise some people who just brush Miller off as a radical:

I went to the Soviet Union [in 1964] for a month as part of a cultural exchange program ... I came way from that month ... with a hardened antipathy to communism ...

There was something bullying egocentric about my admirable Soviet friends, a preoccupation with their own tortured situations that shut out all light from beyond. They were like residents of a planet so heavy that even their gazes were sucked back into its dark center. Arthur Miller, no reactionary, said it best when, a few years later, he and I and some other Americans riding the cultural-exchange bandwagon had entertained, in New York or Connecticut, several visiting Soviet colleagues. The encounter was handsomely catered, the dialogue loud and lively, the will toward friendship was earnest and in its way intoxicating, but upon our ebullient guests' departure Miller looked at me and said sighingly, "Jesus, don't they make you glad you're an American?"

Miller's family lost everything in the stock market crash, and so their situation was quite reduced. I believe they moved to Brooklyn, a huge downward step, off the island, so to speak, and Miller was a young child, but very much remembers the stress and fear of that time. Much of his memory would be put to use later on when writing Death of a Salesman - the tenement buildings, the change of Brooklyn from a more rural area to something crowded and fetid ... Not to mention the fact that he did have an uncle who was a salesman, a brash funny and vaguely pathetic man - an early prototype for Willy Loman.

I did not go into Timebends with any specific expectation like some people did. I didn't think, "He had BETTER talk about Marilyn Monroe for 300 pages straight!" Or "He had BETTER dish on how he felt about Kazan and the HUAC - if he doesn't? I will HATE the book" ... or etc. etc. I found some of it didactic and rather humorless, and much of his political sections were boring and preachy ... but you move through them and then get on to the business of theatre. To Miller, it all was one. You can tell that in his plays as well. His plays always have a "message", some social, political, or cultural message ... and it is that reason that they can sometimes seem didactic in a way that Tennessee Williams' plays never do. It's interesting: they were contemporaries, the two giant stars of the American stage, the two men (with O'Neill and Odets in the generations before paving the way) who brought an American voice and an American perspective where before there had been none. Much of the Broadway fare in the early years of the 20th century, up into the 1920s, was written by Americans, sure, but they took as their inspiration the works of Noel Coward, or Shaw, or other Europeans. It was not a truly American art-form. Vaudeville was, but not the mainstage of the Broadway theatres. That began to change with O'Neill - and Odets ... two wildly different playwrights with different perspectives ... but they cleared the space for what would happen in the 40s, and 50s - when out came playwrights like Miller, and Williams, and Inge, and Saroyan. These playwrights are American to the core. It is a voice I am talking about, a sensibility - it is its own thing, and these guys helped put American on the map, at least in a theatrical sense.

Miller's book details his own part of that historic moment in our cultural life.

It has since come to light that Miller and his last wife - Inge Morath, a photographer - had a child who had Down's Syndrome, and Miller was so horrified and embarrassed that he put the child in an institution and never saw him again. He never even acknowledged the child's existence. For decades. Inge Morath would go to visit her son, but it was a horrible situation. The child is now a man, and many of Miller's old friends have reached out to him - but Miller himself never did. And there's not a word of this in Timebends, which is truly chilling. The daughter he had with Morath - Rebecca - is now a director, actress, writer - and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis - and Miller showers her with praise and love in Timebends. The story about the Down's Syndrome child came out this past year - so reading Timebends in the 80s, you'd never ever know that this giant THING was missing. Miller had some major demons going on, obviously, and I do wonder what price he paid (psychologically, I mean) in keeping this huge thing a secret. His last play was Finishing the Picture (2004) and it was (obviously, if you know Miller's life) the story of the making of The Misfits, with its star actress going deeper and deeper into madness and incomprehensibility, as the hard-drinking macho cast and crew wait for her to appear, so that they can "finish the picture". Miller was 90 years old, and there he is ... going back in time to a moment when maybe he thought he could "save" someone ... going over it and over it (as he had done before, in his play After the Fall) ... maybe in doing so he thought he could change his own past. He died before the revelation came out about his abandoned son, so naturally there has been MUCH chatter on the airwaves about it. For my part, it makes me look at his work in a different way: the evocations of fathers and sons, so common in his work ... the passing on of the torch, so important in all matters of family and mortality ... what do we pass on? What have we, as men, as fathers, made of ourselves? What can I give to my son? What do I have to give? There is a whole new way to look at these existential questions now. It's awful, but I wonder if a lot of his torment and didacticism came from the fact that he had done this awful thing and he felt the need to hide it.

The excerpt I share below is giant, so sit back, and get ready. It is the story of the making of Death of a Salesman, and it is not only my favorite section in the book - but perhaps my favorite section of ANY book. He's an elegant writer, not too emotional, but his memories of that time in his life are intense and you really get the sense that he was pushing himself THROUGH something, he was dreaming himself into a space where he could find his voice and share it. Not an easy thing to do. He had already had one success - All My Sons ... but with Salesman he went deeper. It was profound for him. I will not re-cap his thoughts here - they are all below.

But the elements of this story resonate for me, and have for years, ever since I first read it:

-- his experience of seeing Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, and what it said to him, what it did to him ... It basically gave him permission. To go big, to go huge, to be relevant and important ... not to imitate Williams, that could not be done, they were different men ... but to stop being microscopic and go into the macro-level. (His giving-of-the-props to Williams here is incredibly generous. Because he could very easily have taken the credit himself for what happened to American theatre in the 1940s ... Salesman was as huge a phenomenon as Streetcar ... but he doesn't. He hands that to Williams.)

-- his feeling that he needed to build a shack with his own hands to write the play (he didn't know why he had to, but he knew he did ...) Here he is in front of the shack, many years later.

-- the fact that he would finish work on the play after a long day, and find that he had been crying all day ... without even realizing it

-- Kazan signing on to direct - a huge deal. (And Kazan's response to reading the play for the first time ... gulp ...)

-- finding their Willy Loman. The story of Lee J. Cobb - who was really too young for the part, he was the contemporary of Arthur Kennedy who played his own son ... but how Cobb basically insisted that the part was his and his alone.

-- then - the UNBELIEVABLE story of the moment in rehearsal when Lee J. Cobb "got it". I have goosebumps right now just thinking about it.

-- and then: opening night ... and what happened in that theatre that night.

It is a magnificent story, from beginning to end, and one I treasure. It feels, in a weird way, like it belongs to me. In the same way that I feel that the signing of the Declaration of Independence belongs to me, or that Walt Whitman belongs to me, or that the first walk on the moon belongs to me. These are stories that make up our culture, our history ... and they are part of me, mine.

At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy's wife Linda says what are probably the most famous lines in the entire play:

Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

And so it has.

EXCERPT FROM Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

Already in the sixties I was surprised by the common tendency to think of the late forties and early fifties as some sort of renaissance in the New York theatre. If that was so, I was unaware of it. I thought the theatre a temple being rotted out with commercialized junk, where mostly by accident an occasional good piece of work appeared, usually under some disguise of popular cultural coloration such as a movie star in a leading role.

That said, it now needs correction; it was also a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized, as it would be by the mid-fifties, into young and old, hip and square, or even political left and middle and right. So the playwright's challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America. With ticket prices within reason, this meant that an author was writing for his peers, and if such was really not the case statistically, it was sufficiently so to support an illusion that had a basis in reality. After all, it was not thought particularly daring to present T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party on Broadway, or Laurence Olivier in a Greek tragedy, or Giraudoux's The Madwomen of Chaillot, or any number of other ambitious works. To be sure, such shows had much shorter lives than the trash, but that was to be expected, for most people would much rather laugh than cry, rather watch an actor being hit on the head by a pig bladder than by some painful truth.

The net of it all was that serious writers could reasonably assume they were addressing the whole American mix, and so their plays, whether successfully or not, stretched toward a wholeness of experience that would not require specialists or a coterie to be understood. As alienated a spirit as he was, O'Neill tried for the big audience, and Clifford Odets no less so, along with every other writer longing to prophesy to America, from Whitman and Melville to Dreiser and Hemingway and so on.

For Europe's playwrights the situation was profoundly different, with society already being split beyond healing between the working class and its allies, who were committed to a socialist destiny, and the bourgeois mentality that sought an art of reassurance and the pleasures of forgetting what was happening in the streets. (The first American plays I saw left me wondering where the characters came from. The people I knew were fanatics about surviving, but onstage everyone seemed to have mysteriously guaranteed incomes, and though every play had to have something about "love", there was nothing about sex, which was all there was in Brooklyn, at least that I ever noticed.) An American avant-garde, therefore, if only because the domination of society by the middle class was profoundly unchallenged, could not simply steal from Brecht or even Shaw and expect its voice to reach beyond the small alienated minority that had arrived in their seats already converted to its aims. That was not the way to change the world.

For a play to do that it had to reach precisely those who accepted everything as it was; great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known. I knew only one other writer with the same approach, even if he surrounded his work with a far different aura. This was Tennessee Williams.

If only because he came up at a time when homosexuality was absolutely unacknowledgeable in a public figure, Williams had to belong to a minority culture and understood in his bones what a brutal menace the majority could be if aroused against him. I lived with much the same sense of alienation, albeit for other reasons. Certainly I never regarded him as the sealed-off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line. If he was not an activist, it was not for lack of a desire for justice, nor did he consider a theatre profoundly involved in society and politics, the venerable tradition reaching back to the Greeks, somehow unaesthetic or beyond his interest.

The real theatre - as opposed to the sequestered academic one - is always straining at the inbuilt inertia of a society that always wants to deny change and the pain it necessarily involves. But it is in this effort that the musculature of important work is developed. In a different age, perhaps even only fifteen years later, in the sixties, Williams might have had a more comfortably alienated audience to deal with, one that would have relieved the pressure upon him to extend himself beyond a supportive cult environment, and I think this might well have narrowed the breadth of his work and its intensity. In short, there was no renaissance in the American forties, but there was a certain balance within the audience - a balance, one might call it, between the alienated and the conformists - that gave sufficient support to the naked cry of the heart and, simultaneously, enough resistance to force it into a rhetoric that at one stroke could be broadly understandable and yet faithful to the pain that had pressed the author to speak.

When Kazan invited me up to New Haven to see the new Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire - it seemed to me a rather too garishly attention-getting title - I was already feeling a certain amount of envious curiosity since I was still unable to commit myself to the salesman play, around which I kept suspiciously circling and sniffing. But at the same time I hoped that Streetcar would be good; it was not that I was high-minded but simply that I shared the common assumption of the time that the greater the number of exciting plays there were on Broadway the better for each of us., At least in our minds there was still something approximating a theatre culture to which we more or less pridefully belonged, and the higher its achievement the greater the glory we all shared. The playwright was then king of the hill, not the star actor or director, and certainly not the producer or theatre owner, as would later by the case. (At a recently televised Tony Awards ceremony, recognizing achievement in the theatre, not a single playwright was presented to the public, while two lawyers who operated a chain of theatres were showered with the gratitude of all. It reminded me of Caligula making his horse a senator.)

Streetcar - especially when it was still so fresh and the actors almost as amazed as the audience at the vitality of this theatrical experience - opened one specific door for me. Not the story or the characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge to Europe for me, to Jouvet's performance in Ondine, to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or, as with Maxwell Anderson, only used archaically, as though eloquence could only be justified by cloaking it in sentimental romanticism.

Returning to New York, I felt speeded up, in motion now. With Streetcar, Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words, and better yet, a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself and the world's wonders. I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form, and now it was clear to me that this must be primarily verbal. The language would of course have to be recognizably his to begin with, but it seemed possible now to infiltrate it with a kind of superconsciousness. The play, after all, involved the attempts of his son and his wife and Willy himself to understand what was killing him. And to understand meant to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the "natural". If the structure had to mirror the psychology as directly as could be done, it was still a psychology hammered into its strange shape by society, the business life Willy had lived and believed in. The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two.

By April of 1948 I felt I could find such a form, but it would have to be done, I thought, in a single sitting, in a night or a day, I did not know why. I stopped making my notes in our Grace Court house in Brooklyn Heights and drove up alone one morning to the country house we had bought the previous year. We had spent one summer there in that old farmhouse, which had been modernized by its former owner, a greeting card manufacturer named Philip Jaffe, who as a sideline published a thin magazine for China specialists called Amerasia. Mary worked as one of his secretaries and so had the first news that he wanted to sell the place. In a year or two he would be on trial for publishing without authorization State Department reports from John Stewart Service, among a number of other China experts who recognized a Mao victory as inevitable and warned of the futility of America continuing to back her favorite, Chiang Kai-shek. Amerasia had been a vanity publication, in part born of Jaffe's desire for a place in history, but it nevertheless braved the mounting fury of the China lobby against any opinion questioning the virtues of the Chiang forces. At his trial, the government produced texts of conversations that Jaffe claimed could only have been picked up by long-range microphone as he and his friends walked the isolated backcountry roads near this house. Service was one of many who were purged from the State Department, leaving it blinded to Chinese reality but ideologically pure.

But all that was far from my mind this day; what I was looking for on my land was a spot for a little shack I wanted to build, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. I found a knoll in the nearby woods and returned to the city, where instead of working on the play I drew plans for the framing, of which I really had very vague knowledge and no experience. A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in two days at most, but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself. In reality, all I had was the first two lines and a death - "Will!" and "It's all right. I came back." Further than that I dared not, would not, venture until I could sit in the completed studio, four walls, two windows, a floor, a roof, and a door.

"It's all right. I came back" rolled over and over in my head as I tried to figure out how to join the roof rafters in air unaided, until I finally put them together on the ground and swung them into position all nailed together. When I closed in the roof it was a miracle, as though I had mastered the rain and cooled the sun. And all the while afraid I would never be able to penetrate past those first two lines. I started writing one morning - the tiny studio was still unpainted and smelled of raw wood and sawdust, and the bags of nails were still stashed in a corner with my tools. The sun of April had found my windows to pour through, and the apple buds were moving on the wild trees, showing their first pale blue petals. I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep I realized I had been weeping - my eyes still burned and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game. It would take some six more weeks to complete Act II.

My laughter during the writing came mostly at Willy's contradicting himself so arrantly, and out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden quartet - always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, a clown, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too. yes, and in some far corner of my mind possibly something political; there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer. On the play's opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it "a time bomb under American capitalism"; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of American capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.

But some thirty-five years later, the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more obvious over the decades in the play's hundreds of productions throughout the world: Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of his lies and his self-deluding exaggeration as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what he wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count. When he roared out, "I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!" it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of leveling. (The play was the same age as the Chinese revolution.) I did not know in 1948 in Connecticut that I was sending a message of resurgent individualism to the China of 1983 - especially when the revolution it had signified, it seemed at the time, the long-awaited rule of reason and the historic ending of chaotic egocentricity and selfish aggrandizement. Ah. yes. I had not reckoned on a young Chinese student saying to a CBS interviewer in the theatre lobby, "We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful." What else is this but human unpredictability, which goes on escaping the nets of unfreedom?

I did not move far from the phone for two days after sending the script to Kazan. By the end of the second silent day I would have accepted his calling to tell me that it was a scrambled egg, an impenetrable, unstageable piece of wreckage. And his tone when he finally did call was alarmingly sober.

"I've read your play." He sounded at a loss as to how to give me the bad news. "My God, it's so sad."

"It's supposed to be."

"I just put it down. I don't know what to say. My father..." He broke off, the first of a great many men - and women - who would tell me that Willy was their father. I still thought he was letting me down easy. "It's a great play, Artie. I want to do it in the fall or winter. I'll start thinking about casting." He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. Such is art.

For the first time in months, as I hung up the phone, I could see my family clearly again. As was her way, Mary accepted the great news with a quiet pride, as though something more expressive would spoil me, but I too thought I should remain an ordinary citizen, even an anonymous one (although I did have a look at the new Studebaker convertible, the Raymond Lowery design that was the most beautiful American car of the time, and bought one as soon as the play opened). But Mary's mother, who was staying the week with us, was astonished. "Another play?" she said, as though the success of All My Sons had been enough for one lifetime. She had unknowingly triggered that play when she gossiped about a young girl somewhere in central Ohio who had turned her father in to the FBI for having manufactured faulty aircraft parts during the war.

But who should produce Salesman? Kazan and I walked down Broadway from the park where we had been strolling and talking about the kind of style the production would need. Kazan's partnership with Harold Clurman had recently broken up, and I had no idea about a producer. He mentioned Cheryl Crawford, whom I hardly knew, and then Kermit Bloomgarden, an accountant turned producer, whom I had last seen poring over Herman Shumlin's account books a couple of years before when Shumlin turned down All My Sons. I had never seen Bloomgarden smile, but he had worked for the Group Theatre and Kazan knew him, and as much because we happened to have come to a halt a few yards from his office building as for any other reason, he said, "Well, let's go up and say hello." When we stood across the desk from him and Kazan said he had a play of mine for him to read, Bloomgarden squeezed up his morose version of a smile, or at least a suggestion of one he planned to have next week.

This whimsical transforming of another person's life reminds me of a similar walk with Kazan uptown from a garage on Twenty-sixth Street where he had left his old Pontiac to be repaired. He began wondering aloud whom he should ask to head a new acting school to be called the Actors Studio, which he and Clurman and Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford were organizing. None of these founders was prepared to run the place, Kazan, Clurman, and Lewis being too busy with their flourishing directing careers, and Crawford with her work as a producer. "Lee Strasberg is probably the best guy for it. He'd certainly be able to put in the time." In due course Strasberg became not only the head of the Actors Studio but also its heart and soul, and for the general public its organizer. So his work there was made possibly by his having been unemployable at the right moment. But that, come to think of it, is as good a way as any to be catapulted into world fame.

Willy had to be small, I thought, but we soon realized that Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body. The script had been sent to Lee Cobb, an actor I remembered mainly as a mountainous hulk covered with a towel in a Turkish bath in an Irwin Shaw play, with the hilarious oy vey delivery of a forever persecuted businessman. Having flown himself across the country in his own two-engine airplane, he sat facing me in Bloomgarden's office and announced, "This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man." And he did indeed seem to be the man when a bit later in a coffee shop downstairs he looked up at the young waitress and smiled winsomely as though he had to win her loving embrace before she could be seduced into bringing him his turkey sandwich and coffee - ahead of all the other men's orders, and only after bestowing on his unique slice of pickle her longing kiss.

But while I trusted his and Kazan's experience, I lacked any conviction of my own about him until one evening in our Grace Court living room Lee looked down at my son, Bob, on the floor and I heard him laugh at something funny the child had said. The sorrow in his laughter flew out at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously reedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving.

"You know - or do you? -," Lee said to me one day in Bloomgarden's office a week or so before rehearsals were about to begin, "that this play is a watershed. The American theatre will never be the same." I could only gulp and nod in silence at his portentousness - which I feared might augur a stately performance - and hope that he would make Willy come alive anyway.

But as rehearsals proceeded in the small, periodically abandoned theatre on the ratty roof of the New Amsterdam on Forty-second street, where Ziegfeld in the twenties had staged some intimate revues, Lee seemed to move about in a buffalo's stupefied trance, muttering his lines, plodding with deathly slowness from position to position, and behaving like a man who had been punched in the head. "He's just learning it," Kazan shakily reassured me after three or four days. I waited as a week went by, and then ten days, and all that was emerging from Lee Cobb's throat was a bumpy hum. The other actors were nearing performance levels, but when they had to get a response from Lee all their rhythms slowed to near collapse. Kazan was no longer so sure and kept huddling with Lee, trying to pump him up. Nor did Lee offer any explanation, and I wondered whether he thought to actually play the part like a man with a foot in the grave. Between us, Kazan and I began referring to him as "the Walrus".

On about the twelfth day, in the afternoon, with Eddie Kook, our lighting supplier, and Jimmy Proctor, our pressman, and Kazan and myself in the seats, Lee stood up as usual from the bedroom chair and turned to Mildred Dunnock and bawled, "No, there's more people now ... There's more people!" and, gesturing toward the empty upstage where the window was supposed to be, caused a block of apartment houses to spring up in my brain, and the air became sour with the smell of kitchens where once there had been only the odors of earth, and he began to move frighteningly, with such ominous reality that my chest felt pressed down by an immense weight. After the scene had gone on for a few minutes, I glanced around to see if the others had my reaction. Jim Proctor had his head bent into his hands and was weeping, Eddie Kook was looking shocked, almost appalled, and tears were pouring over his cheeks, and Kazan behind me was grinning like a fiend, gripping his temples with both hands, and we knew we had it - there was an unmistakable wave of life moving across the air of the empty theatre, a wave of Willy's pain and protest. I began to weep myself at some point that was not particularly sad, but it was as much, I think, out of pride in our art, in Lee's magical capacity to imagine, to collect within himself every mote of life since Genesis and to let it pour forth. He stood up there like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position.

At the end of the act, Del Hughes, our sweet but hardheaded, absolutely devoted, competent stage manager, came out from a wing and looked out at us. His stunned eyes started us all laughing. I ran up and kissed Lee, who pretended to be surprised. "But what did you expect, Arthur?" he said, his eyes full of his playful vanity. My God, I thought - he really is Willy! On the subway going home to Brooklyn I felt once again the aching pain in my muscles that the performance had tensed up so tightly, just as in the writing time. And when I thought of it later, it seemed as though Lee's sniffing around the role for so long recapitulated what I had done in the months before daring to begin to write.

The whole production was, I think, unusual for the openness with which every artist involved sought out his truths. It was all a daily, almost moment-to-moment testing of ideas. There was much about the play that had never been done before, and this gave an uncustomary excitement to our discussions about what would or would not be understood by an audience. The setting I had envisioned was three bare platforms and only the minimum necessary furniture for a kitchen and two bedrooms, with the Boston hotel room as well as Howard's office to be played in open space. Jo Mielziner took those platforms and designed an environment around them that was romantic and dreamlike yet at the same time lower-middle-class. His set, in a word, was an emblem of Willy's intense longing for the promises of the past, with which indeed the present state of his mind is always conflicting, and it was thus both a lyrical design and a dramatic one. The only notable mistake in his early concept was to put the gas hot-water heater in the middle of the kitchen, a symbol of menace that I thought obvious and Kazan finally eliminated as a hazard to his staging. But by balancing on the edges of the ordinary bounds of verisimilitude, Jo was stretching reality in parallel with the script, just as Kazan did by syncopating the speech rhythms of the actors. He made Mildred Dunnock deliver her long first-act speeches to the boys at double her normal speed, then he doubled that, and finally she - until recently a speech teacher - was standing there drumming out words as fast as her very capable tongue could manage. Gradually he slacked her off, but the drill straightened her spine, and her Linda filled up with outrage and protest rather than self-pity and mere perplexity. Similarly, to express the plays' inner life, the speech rate in some scenes or sections was unnaturally speeded or slowed.

My one scary hour came with the climactic restaurant fight between Willy and the boys, when it all threatened to come apart. I had written a scene in which Biff resolves to tell Willy that the former boss from whom Biff had planned to borrow money to start a business has refused to so much as see him and does not even remember his working for the firm years ago. But on meeting his brother and father in the restaurant, he realizes that Willy's psychological stress will not permit the whole catastrophic truth to be told, and he begins to trim the bad news. From moment to moment the scene as originally written had so many shadings of veracity that Arthur Kennedy, a very intelligent citizen indeed, had trouble shifting from a truth to a half-truth to a fragment of truth and back to the whole truth, all of it expressed in quickly delivered, very short lines. The three actors, with Kazan standing beside them, must have repeated the scene through a whole working day, and it still wobbled. "I don't see how we can make it happen," Kazan said as we left the theatre that evening. "Maybe you ought to try simplifying it for them." I went home and worked through the night and brought in a new scene, which played much better and became the scene as finally performed.

The other changes were very small and a pleasure to make because they involved adding lines rather than cutting or rewriting. In Act I, Willy is alone in the kitchen muttering to himself, and as his memories overtake him the lighting brightens, the exterior of the house becomes covered with leaf shadows as of old, and in a moment the boys are calling to him in their youthful voices, entering the stage as they were in their teens. There was not sufficient time, however, for them to descend from their beds in the dark on the specially designed elevators and finish stripping out of their pajamas into sweaters and trousers and sneakers, so I had to add time to Willy's monologue. But that was easy since he loved talking to himself about his boys and his vision of them.

The moving in and out of the present had to be not simply indicative but a tactile transformation that the audience could feel as well as comprehend, and indeed come to dread as returning memory threatens to bring Willy closer to his end. Lighting was thus decisively important, and Mielziner, who also lit the show, with Eddie Kook by his side, once worked an entire afternoon lighting a chair.

Willy, in his boss's office, has exploded once too often, and Howard has gone out, leaving him alone. He turns to the office chair, which in the old days was occupied by Frank, Howard's father, who had promised Willy shares in the firm as a reward for all his good work, and as he does so the chair must become alive, quite as though his old boss were in it as he addresses him: "Frank, Frank, don't you remember what you told me? ..." Rather than being lit, the chair subtly seemed to begin emanating light. But this was not merely an exercise in theatre magic; it confirmed that we had moved inside Willy's system of loss, that we were seeing the world as he saw it even as we kept a critical distance and saw it for ourselves.

To set the chair off and make the light change work, all surrounding lights had to dim imperceptibly. That was when Eddie Kook, who had become so addicted to the work on this play that his office at his Century Lighting Company had all but ceased operations, turned to me and said, "You've been asking me why we need so many lights. [We were using more than most musicals.] The reason is right there in front of you - it takes more lights to make it dark." With fewer lights each one would have to be dimmed more noticeably than if there were many, each one fractionally reduced in intensity to create the change without apparent source or contrivance.

Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and Kazan thought Cobb ought to hear some of it, wanting, I suppose, to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended. The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy's part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat at either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past.

As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it.

The Books: "The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx"

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx

When I was a senior in high school, I started dating someone. He had gone to my high school, but he was 3 years ahead of me, so at that time - he was already graduated from high school and a couple of years out into the world. So yeah, baby, I was 16 years old dating a dude who was 19. Hells yeah! The drama nerd takes the lead over her contemporaries in the cafeteria!

And so it is ironic that Groucho Marx would come up on ye olde bookshelf today: Yesterday I posted about Steve Martin. My boyfriend back then reminded me of Steve Martin, even down to what he looked like. He had the same long lean angular body, the same thick hair, the same serious face that could look, when he was performing, completely surreal. But it was more than that. His sense of humor was very similar - absurd yet traditional - surreal yet goofy - and he, too, was an ambitious actor and stand-up, who was already pursuing his dream when he was in high school. He wore hi-top sneakers when he was my date to the Prom, he would take me to old-movie nights at the campus theatre - where I was introduced to the glory of black-and-white films ... and he also made it his business to school me in all things Marx Brothers.

I had a free period in the middle of the day, and my boyfriend lived right down the street from the high school, so I would go over to his house, and he would put in a VHS tape of Marx Brothers movies. And yeah, we would make out, too, and stuff like that, and then I would adjust my blouse and go back to Chemistry class. But mainly, he just wanted me to see all the Marx Brothers movies. We would watch the movies, and occasionally he would pause the tape and rewind so I could watch a bit again, and he could say to me, "Watch the timing here - watch how perfect it is ..." It was so much fun.

A couple of years ago, I reconnected with him - which was a miracle in and of itself - our breakup had been a smashup of apocalyptic proportions, involving all of our friends, and what felt like the entire high school. People I didn't even know, people from other grades, came up to me and said, "Man, I heard about the breakup ... how are you doing?" Insane. For a brief terrible moment, I became one of those girls who was the 'star' of her high school, merely because of her chaotic personal life.

It was so good to see him again, still crazy after all these years.

Miraculously, he came out with a book a couple of years ago - on the history of vaudeville. It is called No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. (The book is terrific. I highly recommend it - indispensable addition to any theatrical-history library.) It got fantastic reviews, including one in The New York Times.

Actually, come to think of it, it wasn't miraculous at all that that old high school boyfriend would go on to write a history of vaudeville (from a libertarian perspective, I might add). One of the most beautiful things for me, about the success he has now achieved, is that it is not at all a surprise - remembering the boy he was. The boy who, at 19, made me watch all the Marx Brothers movies, because he was horrified I hadn't seen them. Who didn't just watch the Marx Brothers ... he STUDIED the Marx Brothers. The boy who was, even then, encyclopedic on vaudeville - knew all the names, all the anecdotes ... and I remember the feeling, back then, that to him - WC Fields, and the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, etc. etc. were as vital and important to him as modern-day movie stars. Even more important, because they were the pioneers.

So it seems apt that the day after I write about Steve Martin (and I had been thinking about my high school boyfriend the entire time I wrote it) - I would come to this wonderful collection of letters from AND TO Groucho Marx. The best thing about this book is that it is a two-sided replication of his lifelong correspondence with people. So we don't just get his letters TO E.B. White or Howard Hughes - we see what these luminaries wrote back to him.

Not surprisingly, the letters are hysterical. They rollick along, and you just feel like you are in the presence of one of the wittiest men who ever lived.

Groucho Marx was not educated, at least in terms of having gone to school. He realized that this was a lack, something he needed to rectify, so he set about to make up for it by becoming extremely well-read. I love the following letter he wrote to Peter Lorre, of all people, in 1961, but look at the topic!

Dear Peter:
It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce's "Ulysses". All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years' difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

Best to you both.

Regards,
Groucho

hahahahahaha It's short, to the point, and is perfection personified. All of his letters are like that. Funny, but not obnoxiously so. I would call them more witty, than out-and-out funny. He was a generous man, a well-brought-up man, who kept up his letter-writing with a variety of people - always polite, always funny, always self-deprecating.

It is a lovely book and has recently been re-released in a nice new volume, a paperback, that you can find at Barnes & Noble. It was originally published in 1967 and I have a second-hand hard copy, but thanks be - someone decided to put it out again.

It's really fun to sit and read through these letters. Groucho is an elegant and humorous companion. No huge revelations here, just joy and wit. I also like the book because it is not arranged chronologically, with letters flying hither and thither to various correspondents. The book is arranged via correspondent - so you get the full set of letters between him and E.B. White - even if they span over many years. So you can get a sense of the relationship, of the continuity. Smart move on the editor.

The excerpt I chose today is his correspondence with T.S. Eliot.

EXCERPT FROM The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx

FROM T.S. ELIOT

26th April, 1961

Dear Groucho Marx,

This is to let you know that your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valery. Whether you really want a photograph of me or whether you merely asked for it out of politeness, you are going to get one anyway. I am ordering a copy of one of my better ones and I shall certainly inscribe it with my gratitude and assurance and admiration. You will have learned that you are my most coveted pin-up. I shall be happy to occupy a much humbler place in your collection.

And incidentally, if and when you and Mrs. Marx are in London, my wife and I hope that you will dine with us.

Yours very sincerely,
T.S. Eliot

P.S. I like cigars too but there isn't any cigar in my portrait either.

June 19, 1961

Dear T.S.:

Your photograph arrived in good shape, and I hope this note of thanks finds you in the same condition.

I had no idea you were so handsome. Why you haven't been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of the casting directors.

Should I come to London I will certainly take advantage of your kind invitation and if you come to California I hope you will allow me to do the same.

Cordially,
Groucho Marx

January 25, 1963

Dear Mr. Eliot:

I read in the current Time Magazine that you are ill. I just want you to know that I am rooting for your quick recovery. First because of your contributions to literature and, then, the fact that under the most trying conditions you never stopped smoking cigars.

Hurry up and get well.

Regards,
Groucho Marx

23rd February, 1963

Dear Groucho Marx,

It seems more of an impertinence to address Groucho Marx as "Dear Mr. Marx" than it would be to address any other celebrity by his first name. It is out of respect, my dear Groucho, that I address you as I do. I should only be too happy to have a letter from Groucho Marx beginning "Dear T.S.E." However, this is to thank you for your letter and to say that I am convalescing as fast as the awful winter weather permits, that my wife and I hope to get to Bermuda later next month for warmth and fresh air and to be back in London in time to greet you in the spring. So come, let us say, about the beginning of May.

Will Mrs. Groucho be with you? (We think we saw you both in Jamaica early in 1961, about to embark in that glass-bottomed boat from which we had just escaped.) You ought to bring a secretary, a public relations official and a couple of private detectives, to protect you from the London press; but however numerous your engagements, we hope you will give us the honor of taking a meal with us.

Yours very sincerely,
T.S. Eliot

P.S. Your portrait is framed on my office mantelpiece, but I have to point you out to my visitors as nobody recognises you without the cigar and rolling eyes. I shall try to provide a cigar worthy of you.

16th May, 1963

Dear Groucho,

I ought to have written at once on my return from Bermuda to thank you for the second beautiful photograph of Groucho, but after being in hospital for five weeks at the end of the year, and then at home for as many under my wife's care, I was shipped off to Bermuda in the hope of getting warmer weather and have only just returned. Still not quite normal activity, but hope to be about when you and Mrs. Groucho turn up. Is there any date known? We shall be away in Yorkshire at the end of June and the early part of July, but are here all the rest of the summer.

Meanwhile, your splendid new portrait is at the framers. I like them both very much and I cannot make up my mind which one to take home and which one to put on my office wall. The new one would impress visitors more, especially those I want to impress, as it is unmistakably Groucho. The only solution may be to carry them both with me every day.

Whether I can produce as good a cigar for you as the one in the portrait appears to be, I do not know, but I will do my best.

Gratefully,
Your admirer,
T.S.

June 11, 1963

Dear Mr. Eliot:

I am a pretty shabby correspondent. I have your letter of May 16th in front of me and I am just getting around to it.

The fact is, the best laid plans of mice and men, etc. Soon after your letter arrived I was struck down by a mild infection. I'm still not over it, but all plans of getting away this summer have gone by the board.

My plan now is to visit Israel the first part of October when all the tourists are back from their various journeys. Then, on my way back from Israel, I will stop off in London to see you.

I hope you have fully recovered from your illness, and don't let anything else happen to you. In October, remember you and I will get drunk together.

Cordially,
Groucho

24th June, 1963

Dear Groucho,

That is not altogether bad news because I shall be in better condition for drinking in October than I am now. I envy you going to Israel and I wish I could go there too if the winter climate is good as I have a keen admiration for the country. I hope to hear about your visit when I see you and I hope that, meanwhile, we shall both be in the best of health.

One of your portraits is on the wall of my office room and the other one on my desk at home.

Salutations,
T.S.

October 1, 1963

Dear Tom,

If this isn't your first name, I'm in a hell of a fix! But I think I read somewhere that your first name is the same as Tom Gibbons', a prizefighter who once lived in St. Paul.

I had no idea you were seventy-five. There's a magnificent tribute to you in the New York Times Book Review Section of the September 29th issue. If you don't get the New York Times let me know and I'll send you my copy. There is an excellent photograph of you by a Mr. Gerard Kelly. I would say, judging from this picture, that you are about sixty and two weeks.

There was also a paragraph mentioning the many portraits that are housed in your study. One name was conspicuous by its absence. I trust this was an oversight on the part of Stephen Spender.

My illness which, three months ago, my three doctors described as trivial, is having quite a run in my system. The three medics, I regret to say, are living on the fat of the land. So far, they've hooked me for eight thousand bucks. I only mention this to explain why I can't get over there in October. However, by next May or thereabouts, I hope to be well enough to eat that free meal you've been promising me for the past two years.

My best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be.

I hope you are well again.

Kindest regards,
Groucho

16th October, 1963

Dear Groucho,

Yours of October 1st to hand. I cannot recall the name of Tom Gibbons at present, but if he helps you to remember my name that is all right with me.

I think that Stephen Spender was only attempting to enumerate oil and water colour pictures and not photographs - I trust so. But, there are a good many photographs of relatives and friends in my study, although I do not recall Stephen going in there. He sent me what he wrote for the New York Times and I helped him a bit and reminded him that I had a good many books, as he might have seen if he had looked about him.

There is also a conspicuous and important portrait in my office room which has been identified by many of my visitors together with other friends of both sexes.

I am sorry that you are not coming over here this year, and still sorrier for the reason for it. I hope, however, that you will turn up in the spring if your doctors leave you a few nickels to pay your way. If you do not turn up, I am afraid all the people to whom I have boasted of knowing you (and on being on first name terms at that) will take me for a four flusher. There will be a free meal and free drinks for you by next May. Meanwhile, we shall be in New York for the month of December and if you should happen to be passing through there at that time of year, I hope you will take a free meal there on me. I would be delighted to see you wherever we are and proud to be seen in your company. My lovely wife joins me in sending you our best, but she didn't add 'whoever he may be' - she knows. It was I who introduced her in the first place to the Marx Brothers films and she is now as keen a fan as I am. Not long ago we went to see a revival of "The Marx Brothers Go West", which I had never seen before. It was certainly worth it.

Ever yours,
Tom

P.S. The photograph is an oil portrait, done 2 years ago, not a photograph direct from life. It is very good-looking and my wife thinks it is a very accurate representation of me.

November 1, 1963

Dear Tom:

Since you are actually an early American, (I don't mean that you are an old piece of furniture, but you are a fugitive from St. Louis), you should have heard of Tom Gibbons. For your edification, Tom Gibbons was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, which is only a stone's throw from Missouri. That is, if the stone is encased in a missile. Tom was, at one time, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, and, although outweighed by twenty pounds by Jack Dempsey, he fought him to a standstill in Shelby, Montana.

The name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashevsky. All male cats are named Tom - unless they have been fixed. In that case they are just neutral and, as the upheaval in Saigon has just proved, there is no place any more for neutrals.

There is an old nursery rhyme that begins "Tom, Tom, the piper's son," etc. The third President of the United States first name was Tom ... in case you've forgotten Jefferson.

So, when I call you Tom, this means you are a mixture of heavyweight prizefighter, a male alley cat and the third President of the United States.

I have just finished my latest opus, "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover". Most of it is autobiographical and very little of it is fiction. I doubt whether it will live through the ages, but if you are in a sexy mood the night you read it, it may stimulate you beyond recognition and rekindle memories that you haven't recalled in years.

Sex, as an industry, is big business in this country, as it is in England. It's something everyone is deeply interested in even if only theoretically. I suppose it's always been this way, but I believe that in the old days it was discussed and practiced in a more surreptitious manner. However, the new school of writers have finally brought the bedroom and the lavatory out into the open for everyone to see. You can blame the whole thing on Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and Brill, Jung and Freud. (Now there's a trio for you!) Plus, of course, the late Mr. Kinsey who, not satisfied with hearsay, trundled from house to house, sticking his nose in where angels have always feared to tread.

However I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don't hesitate. Confide in me. Though admittedly unreliable, I can be trusted with matters as important as that.

If there is a possibility of my being in New York in December, I will certainly try to make it and will let you know in time.

My best to you and Mrs. Tom.

Yours,
Groucho

3rd June, 1964

Dear Groucho,

This is to let you know that we have arranged for a car from International Car Hire (a firm of whom we make a good deal of use) to collect you and Mrs. Groucho at 6:40 p.m. on Saturday from the Savoy, and to bring you to us for dinner and take you home again at the end of the evening. You are, of course, our guests entirely, and we look forward to seeing you both with great pleasure.

The picture of you in the newspapers saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.

Ever yours,
Tom

The Books: "The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx"

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx

When I was a senior in high school, I started dating someone. He had gone to my high school, but he was 3 years ahead of me, so at that time - he was already graduated from high school and a couple of years out into the world. So yeah, baby, I was 16 years old dating a dude who was 19. Hells yeah! The drama nerd takes the lead over her contemporaries in the cafeteria!

And so it is ironic that Groucho Marx would come up on ye olde bookshelf today: Yesterday I posted about Steve Martin. My boyfriend back then reminded me of Steve Martin, even down to what he looked like. He had the same long lean angular body, the same thick hair, the same serious face that could look, when he was performing, completely surreal. But it was more than that. His sense of humor was very similar - absurd yet traditional - surreal yet goofy - and he, too, was an ambitious actor and stand-up, who was already pursuing his dream when he was in high school. He wore hi-top sneakers when he was my date to the Prom, he would take me to old-movie nights at the campus theatre - where I was introduced to the glory of black-and-white films ... and he also made it his business to school me in all things Marx Brothers.

I had a free period in the middle of the day, and my boyfriend lived right down the street from the high school, so I would go over to his house, and he would put in a VHS tape of Marx Brothers movies. And yeah, we would make out, too, and stuff like that, and then I would adjust my blouse and go back to Chemistry class. But mainly, he just wanted me to see all the Marx Brothers movies. We would watch the movies, and occasionally he would pause the tape and rewind so I could watch a bit again, and he could say to me, "Watch the timing here - watch how perfect it is ..." It was so much fun.

A couple of years ago, I reconnected with him - which was a miracle in and of itself - our breakup had been a smashup of apocalyptic proportions, involving all of our friends, and what felt like the entire high school. People I didn't even know, people from other grades, came up to me and said, "Man, I heard about the breakup ... how are you doing?" Insane. For a brief terrible moment, I became one of those girls who was the 'star' of her high school, merely because of her chaotic personal life.

It was so good to see him again, still crazy after all these years.

Miraculously, he came out with a book a couple of years ago - on the history of vaudeville. It is called No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. (The book is terrific. I highly recommend it - indispensable addition to any theatrical-history library.) It got fantastic reviews, including one in The New York Times.

Actually, come to think of it, it wasn't miraculous at all that that old high school boyfriend would go on to write a history of vaudeville (from a libertarian perspective, I might add). One of the most beautiful things for me, about the success he has now achieved, is that it is not at all a surprise - remembering the boy he was. The boy who, at 19, made me watch all the Marx Brothers movies, because he was horrified I hadn't seen them. Who didn't just watch the Marx Brothers ... he STUDIED the Marx Brothers. The boy who was, even then, encyclopedic on vaudeville - knew all the names, all the anecdotes ... and I remember the feeling, back then, that to him - WC Fields, and the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, etc. etc. were as vital and important to him as modern-day movie stars. Even more important, because they were the pioneers.

So it seems apt that the day after I write about Steve Martin (and I had been thinking about my high school boyfriend the entire time I wrote it) - I would come to this wonderful collection of letters from AND TO Groucho Marx. The best thing about this book is that it is a two-sided replication of his lifelong correspondence with people. So we don't just get his letters TO E.B. White or Howard Hughes - we see what these luminaries wrote back to him.

Not surprisingly, the letters are hysterical. They rollick along, and you just feel like you are in the presence of one of the wittiest men who ever lived.

Groucho Marx was not educated, at least in terms of having gone to school. He realized that this was a lack, something he needed to rectify, so he set about to make up for it by becoming extremely well-read. I love the following letter he wrote to Peter Lorre, of all people, in 1961, but look at the topic!

Dear Peter:
It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce's "Ulysses". All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years' difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

Best to you both.

Regards,
Groucho

hahahahahaha It's short, to the point, and is perfection personified. All of his letters are like that. Funny, but not obnoxiously so. I would call them more witty, than out-and-out funny. He was a generous man, a well-brought-up man, who kept up his letter-writing with a variety of people - always polite, always funny, always self-deprecating.

It is a lovely book and has recently been re-released in a nice new volume, a paperback, that you can find at Barnes & Noble. It was originally published in 1967 and I have a second-hand hard copy, but thanks be - someone decided to put it out again.

It's really fun to sit and read through these letters. Groucho is an elegant and humorous companion. No huge revelations here, just joy and wit. I also like the book because it is not arranged chronologically, with letters flying hither and thither to various correspondents. The book is arranged via correspondent - so you get the full set of letters between him and E.B. White - even if they span over many years. So you can get a sense of the relationship, of the continuity. Smart move on the editor.

The excerpt I chose today is his correspondence with T.S. Eliot.

EXCERPT FROM The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx

FROM T.S. ELIOT

26th April, 1961

Dear Groucho Marx,

This is to let you know that your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valery. Whether you really want a photograph of me or whether you merely asked for it out of politeness, you are going to get one anyway. I am ordering a copy of one of my better ones and I shall certainly inscribe it with my gratitude and assurance and admiration. You will have learned that you are my most coveted pin-up. I shall be happy to occupy a much humbler place in your collection.

And incidentally, if and when you and Mrs. Marx are in London, my wife and I hope that you will dine with us.

Yours very sincerely,
T.S. Eliot

P.S. I like cigars too but there isn't any cigar in my portrait either.

June 19, 1961

Dear T.S.:

Your photograph arrived in good shape, and I hope this note of thanks finds you in the same condition.

I had no idea you were so handsome. Why you haven't been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of the casting directors.

Should I come to London I will certainly take advantage of your kind invitation and if you come to California I hope you will allow me to do the same.

Cordially,
Groucho Marx

January 25, 1963

Dear Mr. Eliot:

I read in the current Time Magazine that you are ill. I just want you to know that I am rooting for your quick recovery. First because of your contributions to literature and, then, the fact that under the most trying conditions you never stopped smoking cigars.

Hurry up and get well.

Regards,
Groucho Marx

23rd February, 1963

Dear Groucho Marx,

It seems more of an impertinence to address Groucho Marx as "Dear Mr. Marx" than it would be to address any other celebrity by his first name. It is out of respect, my dear Groucho, that I address you as I do. I should only be too happy to have a letter from Groucho Marx beginning "Dear T.S.E." However, this is to thank you for your letter and to say that I am convalescing as fast as the awful winter weather permits, that my wife and I hope to get to Bermuda later next month for warmth and fresh air and to be back in London in time to greet you in the spring. So come, let us say, about the beginning of May.

Will Mrs. Groucho be with you? (We think we saw you both in Jamaica early in 1961, about to embark in that glass-bottomed boat from which we had just escaped.) You ought to bring a secretary, a public relations official and a couple of private detectives, to protect you from the London press; but however numerous your engagements, we hope you will give us the honor of taking a meal with us.

Yours very sincerely,
T.S. Eliot

P.S. Your portrait is framed on my office mantelpiece, but I have to point you out to my visitors as nobody recognises you without the cigar and rolling eyes. I shall try to provide a cigar worthy of you.

16th May, 1963

Dear Groucho,

I ought to have written at once on my return from Bermuda to thank you for the second beautiful photograph of Groucho, but after being in hospital for five weeks at the end of the year, and then at home for as many under my wife's care, I was shipped off to Bermuda in the hope of getting warmer weather and have only just returned. Still not quite normal activity, but hope to be about when you and Mrs. Groucho turn up. Is there any date known? We shall be away in Yorkshire at the end of June and the early part of July, but are here all the rest of the summer.

Meanwhile, your splendid new portrait is at the framers. I like them both very much and I cannot make up my mind which one to take home and which one to put on my office wall. The new one would impress visitors more, especially those I want to impress, as it is unmistakably Groucho. The only solution may be to carry them both with me every day.

Whether I can produce as good a cigar for you as the one in the portrait appears to be, I do not know, but I will do my best.

Gratefully,
Your admirer,
T.S.

June 11, 1963

Dear Mr. Eliot:

I am a pretty shabby correspondent. I have your letter of May 16th in front of me and I am just getting around to it.

The fact is, the best laid plans of mice and men, etc. Soon after your letter arrived I was struck down by a mild infection. I'm still not over it, but all plans of getting away this summer have gone by the board.

My plan now is to visit Israel the first part of October when all the tourists are back from their various journeys. Then, on my way back from Israel, I will stop off in London to see you.

I hope you have fully recovered from your illness, and don't let anything else happen to you. In October, remember you and I will get drunk together.

Cordially,
Groucho

24th June, 1963

Dear Groucho,

That is not altogether bad news because I shall be in better condition for drinking in October than I am now. I envy you going to Israel and I wish I could go there too if the winter climate is good as I have a keen admiration for the country. I hope to hear about your visit when I see you and I hope that, meanwhile, we shall both be in the best of health.

One of your portraits is on the wall of my office room and the other one on my desk at home.

Salutations,
T.S.

October 1, 1963

Dear Tom,

If this isn't your first name, I'm in a hell of a fix! But I think I read somewhere that your first name is the same as Tom Gibbons', a prizefighter who once lived in St. Paul.

I had no idea you were seventy-five. There's a magnificent tribute to you in the New York Times Book Review Section of the September 29th issue. If you don't get the New York Times let me know and I'll send you my copy. There is an excellent photograph of you by a Mr. Gerard Kelly. I would say, judging from this picture, that you are about sixty and two weeks.

There was also a paragraph mentioning the many portraits that are housed in your study. One name was conspicuous by its absence. I trust this was an oversight on the part of Stephen Spender.

My illness which, three months ago, my three doctors described as trivial, is having quite a run in my system. The three medics, I regret to say, are living on the fat of the land. So far, they've hooked me for eight thousand bucks. I only mention this to explain why I can't get over there in October. However, by next May or thereabouts, I hope to be well enough to eat that free meal you've been promising me for the past two years.

My best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be.

I hope you are well again.

Kindest regards,
Groucho

16th October, 1963

Dear Groucho,

Yours of October 1st to hand. I cannot recall the name of Tom Gibbons at present, but if he helps you to remember my name that is all right with me.

I think that Stephen Spender was only attempting to enumerate oil and water colour pictures and not photographs - I trust so. But, there are a good many photographs of relatives and friends in my study, although I do not recall Stephen going in there. He sent me what he wrote for the New York Times and I helped him a bit and reminded him that I had a good many books, as he might have seen if he had looked about him.

There is also a conspicuous and important portrait in my office room which has been identified by many of my visitors together with other friends of both sexes.

I am sorry that you are not coming over here this year, and still sorrier for the reason for it. I hope, however, that you will turn up in the spring if your doctors leave you a few nickels to pay your way. If you do not turn up, I am afraid all the people to whom I have boasted of knowing you (and on being on first name terms at that) will take me for a four flusher. There will be a free meal and free drinks for you by next May. Meanwhile, we shall be in New York for the month of December and if you should happen to be passing through there at that time of year, I hope you will take a free meal there on me. I would be delighted to see you wherever we are and proud to be seen in your company. My lovely wife joins me in sending you our best, but she didn't add 'whoever he may be' - she knows. It was I who introduced her in the first place to the Marx Brothers films and she is now as keen a fan as I am. Not long ago we went to see a revival of "The Marx Brothers Go West", which I had never seen before. It was certainly worth it.

Ever yours,
Tom

P.S. The photograph is an oil portrait, done 2 years ago, not a photograph direct from life. It is very good-looking and my wife thinks it is a very accurate representation of me.

November 1, 1963

Dear Tom:

Since you are actually an early American, (I don't mean that you are an old piece of furniture, but you are a fugitive from St. Louis), you should have heard of Tom Gibbons. For your edification, Tom Gibbons was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, which is only a stone's throw from Missouri. That is, if the stone is encased in a missile. Tom was, at one time, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, and, although outweighed by twenty pounds by Jack Dempsey, he fought him to a standstill in Shelby, Montana.

The name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashevsky. All male cats are named Tom - unless they have been fixed. In that case they are just neutral and, as the upheaval in Saigon has just proved, there is no place any more for neutrals.

There is an old nursery rhyme that begins "Tom, Tom, the piper's son," etc. The third President of the United States first name was Tom ... in case you've forgotten Jefferson.

So, when I call you Tom, this means you are a mixture of heavyweight prizefighter, a male alley cat and the third President of the United States.

I have just finished my latest opus, "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover". Most of it is autobiographical and very little of it is fiction. I doubt whether it will live through the ages, but if you are in a sexy mood the night you read it, it may stimulate you beyond recognition and rekindle memories that you haven't recalled in years.

Sex, as an industry, is big business in this country, as it is in England. It's something everyone is deeply interested in even if only theoretically. I suppose it's always been this way, but I believe that in the old days it was discussed and practiced in a more surreptitious manner. However, the new school of writers have finally brought the bedroom and the lavatory out into the open for everyone to see. You can blame the whole thing on Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and Brill, Jung and Freud. (Now there's a trio for you!) Plus, of course, the late Mr. Kinsey who, not satisfied with hearsay, trundled from house to house, sticking his nose in where angels have always feared to tread.

However I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don't hesitate. Confide in me. Though admittedly unreliable, I can be trusted with matters as important as that.

If there is a possibility of my being in New York in December, I will certainly try to make it and will let you know in time.

My best to you and Mrs. Tom.

Yours,
Groucho

3rd June, 1964

Dear Groucho,

This is to let you know that we have arranged for a car from International Car Hire (a firm of whom we make a good deal of use) to collect you and Mrs. Groucho at 6:40 p.m. on Saturday from the Savoy, and to bring you to us for dinner and take you home again at the end of the evening. You are, of course, our guests entirely, and we look forward to seeing you both with great pleasure.

The picture of you in the newspapers saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.

Ever yours,
Tom

The Books: "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life" (Steve Martin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin

If I had been in college in the late 70s as opposed to in grade school, I would have been a Steve Martin fanatic. As it was, as a 10 year old, 11 year old - his fame and importance trickled down to my level ... There was enough in his adolescent humor that would appeal to a child - but there was a sophistication there as well that made me feel that he was really for grown-ups. There was a danger to him. He seemed smart, but in a way that sometimes seemed off-putting ... he didn't chat with his audience, he didn't do casual banter ... he was on some other plane. Yet he was also the biggest goofball on the planet, skipping around giant stages with an arrow through his head playing a banjo. He was truly riveting. I had heard of him, of course. Everyone had heard of him. But it was like he came from out of nowhere back then. A new show called Saturday Night Live had aired ... and sometimes I was allowed up that late to see it ... and sometimes this crazy guy hosted it and he would wear an arrow through his head. Or he would play the banjo. Or make balloon animals. I didn't understand him. But I didn't need to understand him. If I had been in college, like I said, I would have understood him on a deeper level - the true anarchy (and yet laser-sharp specificity) of his brand of humor ... but as a kid, I understood anarchy. I understood how hilarious this guy was. He seemed like an emissary from another dimension. There was an element to his humor that made it seem like he was making fun of the audience. Or, was it just that some of it was beyond me so it came off that way? And what the HELL WAS GOING ON WITH THAT ARROW? He was a big big deal, and even though I, as a child in Toughskins riding my bicycle to the corner store, was not his target audience - his fame reached me.

In the next couple of years would come The Jerk (an old favorite of mine), and other movies - but I always liked his standup best ... and now with Youtube, you can watch some of that concert footage. Uhm .... Steve? It is truly bizarre. Surreal art at its height. With a slapstick undertone. His humor is truly his own. Yes, he references Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor - the giant standups at the time ... but he has added his own damn thing here ... It stands alone. And please watch his body language. Mixed with that startling white suit ... the body language comes off as genuinely odd. (And watch what he does with his hands from about the 1:01 mark to the 1:05 mark). It is a great mistake to think that Steve Martin was "just" being a "wild and crazy guy". No, he wasn't. Everything was planned. Everything. And what he does with his hands there, a variation on the larger theme, is hysterical ... He is taking the big crazy movements and penning them up in a tiny bottle, so they come out small and squashed. So while the overall impression here is one of insanity, and "anything goes" ... at the bottom of it is a meticulous planning spirit. He knows exactly what he is doing in every single moment he is on that stage.

I'm not sure that I got that about him, when I was little. I remember seeing him on The Tonight Show, on roller skates, doing his "King Tut" number and it was so damn funny, I loved him so much, and the "King Tut" song became a favorite in the grade-school set, featured in many a talent show in the Multi-Purpose Room ... after all, the whole "King Tut" thing was a cultural event like a bomb going off in my generation. At least that's how I remember it. Suddenly, everything was about ancient Egypt. Steve Martin's number tapped into that universal consciousness, and made fun of it, sure - but also honored it. He wasn't really a cynical presence ... not really ... I found cynicism scary when I was little. It seemed threatening. There was very little (read: zero) contempt in his humor ... which also set him apart from some of his contemporaries. But boy was he subversive. I couldn't tell what he was actually doing half the time - his process was opaque - HE HIMSELF was opaque in his act - it was not confessional, or even observational humor ... it was something else altogether. Like Salvador Dali.

Perspective would come later. But at the time, as a little kid, all I knew was that there was this new guy named Steve Martin and he seemed to be everywhere. I "got" it, but I didn't get it. He didn't scare the shit out of me like Richard Pryor did - appreciation for Pryor would come later, when I could handle it ... but Martin was daunting, in a way. In the late 70s, I was 11 years old, on the cusp of being a teenager, on the cusp of being part of that larger culture ... and I would get a whiff of things from "over there" ... on the side of grown-up land ... things I wasn't "ready" for yet, but that were almost in my grasp. Steve Martin, in his white suit, with a balloon wrapped around his head, seemed to be the gatekeeper.

Years passed. The white-hot flame of the Steve Martin phenomenon faded a bit, and he started making movies. Many of them were good. Some were not so good. It was hard to remember, at times, that once upon a time this man was playing packed stadiums, dancing around in a pharoah's turban. It was in the past. I never thought to myself, "I wonder why he doesn't do standup anymore." It never even occurred to me, which is odd - in retrospect - because those are the kinds of things that always occur to me. It's not like I forgot. It just receded into the distant past and I accepted this new movie-star Steve Martin, and went to see his movies, and laughed, and recited lines afterwards, and that seemed to be that.

Later, much later, Steve Martin started writing novels. I was curious. I loved his witty intellectual pieces of satire in The New Yorker, and loved him, in general. So I picked up Shopgirl - a novella - and read it in a couple of hours. I could not put it down. I cried as I read it. My review of the book is here. I wouldn't change a word of it. Not only is it a good story, with three really good characters, it was one of those rare books where I felt named by it. I recognized myself in it. I felt embarrassed, like Steve Martin had seen too much. I cherish such books. I wrote in my review:

The way it is written is what is unconventional about it. The "voice" of the book (and that whole "voice" concept will come up again and again in the book - you'll even see it in the excerpt below) struck me right away. This is not a casual in-the-moment voice. Of course not. It's Steve Martin. Steve Martin's genius had to do with his distance from things - hard to explain (but he does a great job of it in his memoir). He is not in the thick-and-thin of life ... he stands slightly to the side. That's what the voice of this delicate little book sounds like. I loved the voice. It is (not to give anything more away) completely omniscient - which might seen a bit heavy-handed for such a tiny little love story. But Martin uses it very consciously. It is how the story NEEDS to be told. I love the sound of the book. There are times in the thick-and-thin of life, the unfairness of events, the up and down of fortune ... when I also yearn for an omniscient voice.

And it occurs to me that what I have been trying to describe in Steve Martin's standup is a certain brand of omniscience. He is not sharing himself, he does not say, "A funny thing happened to me today ..." He stands back, way way way back, and circles above the earth, and at that perspective - not just some things are absurd, but everything is absurd. Yet in Shopgirl, he takes that omniscient perspective and pours it into a deeply compassionate heartfelt little story about a lonely depressed girl who is released into life through her love affair with an older vaguely cold man. The omniscient voice was off-putting for the first couple of pages of the story, but then I realized its purpose. Omniscience does not mean just mean "All-Knowing" or distant. It can mean perceptive. It can mean seeing the bigger picture. Sometimes life, in its mucky-muck, its struggles, can lose a sense of omniscience, of purpose. And it is love, at times, that creates a sense of omniscience. Of being seen, of being known - not just in our everyday selves, but in our spirit, our essence. That is what the book is about. It is shatteringly moving. Martin writes:

Saturday night usually offers a spontaneous get-together with the other Habitat workers in a nearby bar. If that doesn't happen, which this night it doesn't, Mirabelle is not afraid to go to a local bar alone, which this night she does, where she might run into someone she knows or nurse a drink and listen to the local band. As she sits in a booth and checks the amplifiers for Jeremy's signature stencil, it never occurs to Mirabelle to observe herself, and thus she is spared the image of a shy girl sitting alone in a bar on Saturday night. A girl who is willing to give every ounce of herself to someone, who could never betray her lover, who never suspects maliciousness of anyone, and whose sexuality sleeps in her, waiting to be stirred. She never feels sorry for herself, except when the overpowering chemistry of depression inundates her and leaves her helpless. She moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranded in the vast openness of L.A. She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near misses is starting to overwhelm her. What Mirabelle needs is some omniscient voice to illuminate and spotlight her, and to inform everyone that this one has value, this one over here, the one sitting in the bar by herself, and then to find her counterpart and bring him to her.

So, as always, Steve Martin knew exactly what he was doing when he "chose" the voice in which to tell Shopgirl. He chose an omniscient voice because that was what Mirabelle needed. Not omniscient as in distant - but omniscient as in knowing and seeing. The couple of times I have been loved, and truly loved, by a man ... it has seemed to me as though he had some omniscient understanding of me, my character, my hopes, my dreams ... He saw me when I could not see myself. He kept my dreams, my hopes in HIS mind ... because I had a tendency to forget. And so I could look to him and remember: Oh yes. THAT is who I am. He knows. This is a great power to give to someone (although, in the moment, it never feels like you are giving anyone power - it feels like they just HAVE that power ... and perhaps the experience is a mixture of the two) ... and in Shopgirl Martin tells a story where the power that omniscience gives someone can be dangerous ... and Mirabelle, fragile already, is shattered. To be seen and released by love after such a long dormant period ... and then to have it not come to full fruition ... Martin really really gets how devastating that situation is. He does not make it melodramatic. He does not dwell on Mirabelle's tear-soaked face. With almost cold elegant prose, he details what Mirabelle does, who she is ... and who Ray is and who Jeremy is ... and by the end of the book, I felt like I had been put through the wringer, but also that I had a deeper understanding of my own dangerous response to love, to an omniscient eye ... and the book also told me, gently, It'll be okay ... just hang in there ... breathe ... it'll be okay ...

Steve Martin knocked my socks off with Shopgirl. I guess I had never seen that side of him. He always seemed like a kind man, although a bit distant ... he never seemed self-destructive or self-involved ... but to write a book with that level of compassion and sensitivity and insight ... Wow.

He has also said that the Ray character (the one he ended up playing in the lovely movie of his book) is really the closest he has ever come to playing himself. Which is truly illuminating. Ray is cold, cut off, and yet, like most of us, wants human companionship. He wants it on his terms. He sees the lovely delicate girl behind the glove counter and begins to court her. She is way too young for him, but at a certain level of life, what does that matter? Ray is wealthy. Mirabelle is a failed artist who is a shopgirl and lives in a tiny apartment. It's not that he showers her with gifts, a la Pretty Woman. This is not a Cinderella story. He quietly insinuates himself into her life, but without ever seeming like a user, or creepy. He sees something in her. His interest in her is genuine. He has no intention of going the long haul with her, but for the time being, she is a nice companion. Mirabelle is in hiding. She is lost. Quiet, narrow, uptight. There is damage there, somewhere. Ray can't see it at first. By the time he does see it, it is too late. Mirabelle has been shattered by their love affair.

To see Martin in this role is to realize how limiting some of his film work has been. Seeing him in Disney-sponsored pater familias parts just never really worked for me (although I did like him in Parenthood - because there was an underbelly of anxiety and anger in that guy ... it seemed to fit with Martin's energy) ... I think Shopgirl is some of his best acting work. You've never seen such a Steve Martin. He's humorless, but not totally cold. He looks at Mirabelle, and he has enough distance from her (which ends up being the downfall) that he can see her, he can be that omniscient voice. But omniscience comes with responsibility ... Bah, I'm making the book sound preachy and drippy. It is not at all. It is a short spare volume of character development, quiet fragments, and perfect details. I am so admiring of him as a writer.

So I was beyond excited last year when Martin came out with a memoir of his time as a standup called Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. The book would not focus on his entire life, or his whole time on this planet. It would hone in on what happened to him in the 70s that put him into the pantheon, one of the most successful stand-up comics of all time - someone who, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not go the regular route. He was strictly underground. He has said that his success was more "rock and roll" than "comedic" ... meaning: he did not play the regular club circuit endlessly, he did not take a traditional route. His superstardom came like a meteor from outer space, but it was his own creation. Like grunge bands playing tiny clubs in Seattle and suddenly finding themselves playing Giants Stadium. That is not normally how a comic becomes famous, but that was what happened to Steve Martin. How?? Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life describes how.

It was, hands down, my favorite book I read last year.

Steve Martin details, step by intellectual step, the development of his style. It was not organic for him, ever. He was someone who had a lot of interests, who was incredibly geeky, but who wasn't really good at anything. He is quite honest about that. He wasn't really funny, he wasn't the best actor ... but he was fortunate enough, very early on, to find some mentors who basically fostered his geeky interests ... and so Steve Martin percolated. Over the years. As a child, his family moved right down the street from Disneyland - and it was that that changed his whole life. He got a job at the Magic Shop on Main Street, and so began his intense training in magic tricks. He was a teenager, behind the counter, entertaining tourists with magic tricks, and honing his craft.

He watched professional magicians, memorizing their moves. Most of the stuff he did early on, he stole. He lifted people's entire acts from them wholesale and recreated them, not realizing how bad that really is. He was just trying to learn. He started getting gigs - at local veterans' associations and the like ... and he would do magic. He kept copious meticulous notes (which he recreates in facsimile in his book) - he knew when something didn't work, so he would make note of it, to correct it the next time.

Leave out unncessary jokes, change patter for sq. circle, relax, don't shake.

I find these things, replete with misspellings, in shaky teenage-boy handwriting, very moving. He knew he was working on something, but he just wasn't sure what yet.

Martin writes in the book:

But there was a problem. At age eighteen, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

He was obsessed with things, and he didn't know why. He was obsessed with the banjo (he couldn't play, although he practiced like crazy), he was obsessed with magic, he was obsessed with balloon animals, he was obsessed with language ... It's an amazing book because you can see how everything he did later on was 100% deliberate. He didn't think, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the banjo?" He played the banjo because he had been obsessed with the banjo since he was 10 years old. Everything - everything - went into what would eventually become his act. But that was years in the making.

He got jobs in summer stock which was great for building confidence. He started mixing comedy in with magic ... but he realized instantly what worked and what didn't. He was like a mad scientist, or an alchemist, hovering over a bubbling cauldron. If I throw THIS in, will it work? Nothing was accidental. Everything was there for a purpose.

The book is fascinating - one of the best I have read about what is usually called the creative process. Everyone is different, and everyone has a mind that works in its own way ... so this is Steve Martin's excavation of his own mind, and how disparate elements came together ... slowly, adding this in, taking that out ... until he not only "broke through" - but shot upwards, into the stratosphere of entertainment. His shows grew. He had an underground following, strictly bootleg. Kind of like Metallica's early years, when their fame grew by the passing around of cassette tapes - because they weren't getting any radio play. Amazing. Johnny Carson took notice. He had him on The Tonight Show. And that was that. No turning back. Carson was unbelievably generous with up-and-coming comics and appearing on The Tonight Show was evidence that you had arrived. Steve Martin never was out of character. He did not sit and banter. He glowered, sneered, broke into hysterical silent laughter, danced like crazy - jiggling his body this way and that - always in his immaculate white suit which truly made him look like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. Someone who had once been a banker who tripped off the rails. He was like no one else. Lorne Michaels took notice. By that point, Martin was playing stadiums. It frightened him. The crowds were too big. He remembered the one night he was told 3,000 people were out there. He was like, "What?" Used to playing small clubs, he didn't know how his act would survive in such a huge arena. Then he was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

And the next time he asked someone, "How many people are out there tonight" he heard the unreal answer come back, "22,000."

Martin's breakdown of how he made it work, how he adjusted his act to fit the circumstances - all are a great tribute to his intellect, his smarts, his perseverance. He acted SO INSANE yet there he was buttoned-up in a suit like a Jehovah's Witness on your doorstep.

Martin writes:

I cut my hair, shaved my beard, and put on a suit. I stripped the act of all political references, which I felt was an act of defiance. To politics I was saying, "I'll get along without you very well. It's time to be funny." Overnight, I was no longer at the tail end of an old movement but at the front end of a new one. Instead of looking like another freak with a crazy act, I now looked like a visitor from the straight world who had gone seriously awry.

One of my favorite tidbits of information is about the famous white suit and how that came to be.

I worried about being seen at such distances - this was a small comedy act. For visibility, I bought a white suit to wear onstage. I was conflicted because the white suit had already been used by entertainers, including John Lennon. I was afraid it might seem derivative, but I stayed with it for practical reasons, and it didn't seem to matter to the audience or critics. The suit was made of gabardine, which always stayed fresh and flowed smoothly with my body. It got noticed in the press because it was three-piece, which appeared to be a symbol of conservatism, but I really wore the vest so my shirt would stay tucked in my pants.

Amazing. A practical choice, made to solve a problem (he needed to be visible on the stage in those giant stadiums) turned into an iconic looking-glass image of the counterculture.

Steve Martin, at the height of his standup fame, walked away. He has never looked back. Time and place, perhaps. He knew to throw in the towel when people would HOWL with despair, rather than overstay his welcome. That took guts. His is not a normal talent, it is not an ingratiating talent. It is his and his alone. He loved the audiences, yes, the energy in those arenas had to be amazing (you can feel it in the clips of concert footage) ... but eventually the energy came to be too much, he felt that his act started becoming "automatic" and that was death to him. He needed to shake things up again, walk away, and see what else was out there.

Here's an excerpt. This is from his years in college. Watch how methodical Martin is here, showing us the step by step process of his obsessions, and how that developed his mind and his ideas about what he thought was funny. He is the most intellectual of comics.

Best book of 2007.

EXCERPT FROM Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin

I continued to attend Long Beach State College, taking Stormie-inspired courses in metaphysics, ethics, and logic. New and exhilarating words such as "epistemology", "ontology", "pragmatism" and "existentialism" - words whose definitions alone were stimulating - swirled through my head and reconfigured my thinking. One semester I was taking Philosophy of Language, Continual Rationalism (whatever that is; what, Descartes?), History of Ethics, and to complete the group, Self-Defense, which I found especially humiliating when, one afternoon in class, I was nearly beaten up by a girl wearing boxing gloves. A course in music appreciation focused me on classical music, causing me to miss the pop music o my own era, so I got into the Beatles several years late. I was fixated on studying, and even though I kept my outside jobs, my drive for learning led to a significant improvement from my dismal high school grade average. I was now an A student. I switched to cotton pants called peggers, because I had vowed to grow up and abandon jeans. My look was strictly wholesome Baptist.

A friend lent me some comedy records. There were three by Nichols and May, several by Lenny Bruce, and one by Tom Lehrer, the great song parodist. Mike Nichols and Elaine May recorded without an audience, and I fixated on every nuance. Their comedy was sometimes created by only a subtle vocal shift: "Tell me Dr. Schweitzer, what is this reverence for life?" Lenny Bruce, on the records I heard, was doing mostly nonpolitical bits that were hilarious. Warden at a prison riot: "We're giving in to your demands, men! Except the vibrators!" Tom Lehrer influenced me with one bizarre joke: "My brother Henry was a nonconformist. To show you what a noncomformist he was, he spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y." Some people fall asleep at night listening to music; I fell asleep to Lenny, Tom and Mike and Elaine. These albums broke ground and led me to a Darwinian discovery: Comedy could evolve.

On campus I experienced two moments of illumination, both appropriately occurring in the bright sun. Now comfortable with indulging in overthinking, I was walking across the quad when a thought came to me, one that was nearly devastating. To implement the new concept called originality that I had been first introduced to in Showmanship for Magicians, and was now presenting itself again in my classes in literature, poetry, and philosophy, I would have to write everything in the act myself. Any line or idea with even a vague feeling of familiarity or provenance had to be expunged. There could be nothing that made the audience feel they weren't seeing something utterly new.

This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy - at all. But I did know I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, all pilfered from gag books and other people's routines, and consequently lose ten minutes from my already strained act. Worse, I would lose another prime gag I had lifted, Carl Ballantine's never-fail Appearing Dove, which had been appropriated by almost every comic magician under the age of twenty. Ballantine would blow up a paper bag and announce that he was going to produce a dove. "Come out flyin'!" he would say. Then he would pop the bag with his hands, and an anemic flutter of feathers would poof out from the sack. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.

I came up with several schemes for developing material. "I laugh in life," I thought, "so why not observe what it is that makes me laugh?" And if I did spot something that was funny, I decided not to just describe it as happening to someone else, but to translate it into the first person, so it was happening to me. A guy didn't walk into a bar, I did. I didn't want it to appear that others were nuts; I wanted it to appear that I was nuts.

Another method was to idly and abstractedly dream up bits. Sitting in a science class, I stared at the periodic table of the elements that hung behind the professor. That weekend I went onstage at the Ice House and announced, "And now I would like to do a dramatic reading of the periodic table of the elements. Fe ... Au ... He ..." I said. That bit didn't last long.

In logic class, I opened my textbook - the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration - and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
___________________________________________

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:

1. Babies are illogical.
2. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3. Illogical persons are despised.
___________________________________________

Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.

And:

1. No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
2. No modern poetry is free from affectation.
3. All your poems on the subject of soap bubbles.
4. No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.
5. Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.
___________________________________________

Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical - yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll's clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, "I'm not going home tonight; I'm going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green." Not at Lewis Carroll's level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction.

I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e.e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, "Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning.

The Books: "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life" (Steve Martin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin

If I had been in college in the late 70s as opposed to in grade school, I would have been a Steve Martin fanatic. As it was, as a 10 year old, 11 year old - his fame and importance trickled down to my level ... There was enough in his adolescent humor that would appeal to a child - but there was a sophistication there as well that made me feel that he was really for grown-ups. There was a danger to him. He seemed smart, but in a way that sometimes seemed off-putting ... he didn't chat with his audience, he didn't do casual banter ... he was on some other plane. Yet he was also the biggest goofball on the planet, skipping around giant stages with an arrow through his head playing a banjo. He was truly riveting. I had heard of him, of course. Everyone had heard of him. But it was like he came from out of nowhere back then. A new show called Saturday Night Live had aired ... and sometimes I was allowed up that late to see it ... and sometimes this crazy guy hosted it and he would wear an arrow through his head. Or he would play the banjo. Or make balloon animals. I didn't understand him. But I didn't need to understand him. If I had been in college, like I said, I would have understood him on a deeper level - the true anarchy (and yet laser-sharp specificity) of his brand of humor ... but as a kid, I understood anarchy. I understood how hilarious this guy was. He seemed like an emissary from another dimension. There was an element to his humor that made it seem like he was making fun of the audience. Or, was it just that some of it was beyond me so it came off that way? And what the HELL WAS GOING ON WITH THAT ARROW? He was a big big deal, and even though I, as a child in Toughskins riding my bicycle to the corner store, was not his target audience - his fame reached me.

In the next couple of years would come The Jerk (an old favorite of mine), and other movies - but I always liked his standup best ... and now with Youtube, you can watch some of that concert footage. Uhm .... Steve? It is truly bizarre. Surreal art at its height. With a slapstick undertone. His humor is truly his own. Yes, he references Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor - the giant standups at the time ... but he has added his own damn thing here ... It stands alone. And please watch his body language. Mixed with that startling white suit ... the body language comes off as genuinely odd. (And watch what he does with his hands from about the 1:01 mark to the 1:05 mark). It is a great mistake to think that Steve Martin was "just" being a "wild and crazy guy". No, he wasn't. Everything was planned. Everything. And what he does with his hands there, a variation on the larger theme, is hysterical ... He is taking the big crazy movements and penning them up in a tiny bottle, so they come out small and squashed. So while the overall impression here is one of insanity, and "anything goes" ... at the bottom of it is a meticulous planning spirit. He knows exactly what he is doing in every single moment he is on that stage.

I'm not sure that I got that about him, when I was little. I remember seeing him on The Tonight Show, on roller skates, doing his "King Tut" number and it was so damn funny, I loved him so much, and the "King Tut" song became a favorite in the grade-school set, featured in many a talent show in the Multi-Purpose Room ... after all, the whole "King Tut" thing was a cultural event like a bomb going off in my generation. At least that's how I remember it. Suddenly, everything was about ancient Egypt. Steve Martin's number tapped into that universal consciousness, and made fun of it, sure - but also honored it. He wasn't really a cynical presence ... not really ... I found cynicism scary when I was little. It seemed threatening. There was very little (read: zero) contempt in his humor ... which also set him apart from some of his contemporaries. But boy was he subversive. I couldn't tell what he was actually doing half the time - his process was opaque - HE HIMSELF was opaque in his act - it was not confessional, or even observational humor ... it was something else altogether. Like Salvador Dali.

Perspective would come later. But at the time, as a little kid, all I knew was that there was this new guy named Steve Martin and he seemed to be everywhere. I "got" it, but I didn't get it. He didn't scare the shit out of me like Richard Pryor did - appreciation for Pryor would come later, when I could handle it ... but Martin was daunting, in a way. In the late 70s, I was 11 years old, on the cusp of being a teenager, on the cusp of being part of that larger culture ... and I would get a whiff of things from "over there" ... on the side of grown-up land ... things I wasn't "ready" for yet, but that were almost in my grasp. Steve Martin, in his white suit, with a balloon wrapped around his head, seemed to be the gatekeeper.

Years passed. The white-hot flame of the Steve Martin phenomenon faded a bit, and he started making movies. Many of them were good. Some were not so good. It was hard to remember, at times, that once upon a time this man was playing packed stadiums, dancing around in a pharoah's turban. It was in the past. I never thought to myself, "I wonder why he doesn't do standup anymore." It never even occurred to me, which is odd - in retrospect - because those are the kinds of things that always occur to me. It's not like I forgot. It just receded into the distant past and I accepted this new movie-star Steve Martin, and went to see his movies, and laughed, and recited lines afterwards, and that seemed to be that.

Later, much later, Steve Martin started writing novels. I was curious. I loved his witty intellectual pieces of satire in The New Yorker, and loved him, in general. So I picked up Shopgirl - a novella - and read it in a couple of hours. I could not put it down. I cried as I read it. My review of the book is here. I wouldn't change a word of it. Not only is it a good story, with three really good characters, it was one of those rare books where I felt named by it. I recognized myself in it. I felt embarrassed, like Steve Martin had seen too much. I cherish such books. I wrote in my review:

The way it is written is what is unconventional about it. The "voice" of the book (and that whole "voice" concept will come up again and again in the book - you'll even see it in the excerpt below) struck me right away. This is not a casual in-the-moment voice. Of course not. It's Steve Martin. Steve Martin's genius had to do with his distance from things - hard to explain (but he does a great job of it in his memoir). He is not in the thick-and-thin of life ... he stands slightly to the side. That's what the voice of this delicate little book sounds like. I loved the voice. It is (not to give anything more away) completely omniscient - which might seen a bit heavy-handed for such a tiny little love story. But Martin uses it very consciously. It is how the story NEEDS to be told. I love the sound of the book. There are times in the thick-and-thin of life, the unfairness of events, the up and down of fortune ... when I also yearn for an omniscient voice.

And it occurs to me that what I have been trying to describe in Steve Martin's standup is a certain brand of omniscience. He is not sharing himself, he does not say, "A funny thing happened to me today ..." He stands back, way way way back, and circles above the earth, and at that perspective - not just some things are absurd, but everything is absurd. Yet in Shopgirl, he takes that omniscient perspective and pours it into a deeply compassionate heartfelt little story about a lonely depressed girl who is released into life through her love affair with an older vaguely cold man. The omniscient voice was off-putting for the first couple of pages of the story, but then I realized its purpose. Omniscience does not mean just mean "All-Knowing" or distant. It can mean perceptive. It can mean seeing the bigger picture. Sometimes life, in its mucky-muck, its struggles, can lose a sense of omniscience, of purpose. And it is love, at times, that creates a sense of omniscience. Of being seen, of being known - not just in our everyday selves, but in our spirit, our essence. That is what the book is about. It is shatteringly moving. Martin writes:

Saturday night usually offers a spontaneous get-together with the other Habitat workers in a nearby bar. If that doesn't happen, which this night it doesn't, Mirabelle is not afraid to go to a local bar alone, which this night she does, where she might run into someone she knows or nurse a drink and listen to the local band. As she sits in a booth and checks the amplifiers for Jeremy's signature stencil, it never occurs to Mirabelle to observe herself, and thus she is spared the image of a shy girl sitting alone in a bar on Saturday night. A girl who is willing to give every ounce of herself to someone, who could never betray her lover, who never suspects maliciousness of anyone, and whose sexuality sleeps in her, waiting to be stirred. She never feels sorry for herself, except when the overpowering chemistry of depression inundates her and leaves her helpless. She moved from Vermont hoping to begin her life, and now she is stranded in the vast openness of L.A. She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near misses is starting to overwhelm her. What Mirabelle needs is some omniscient voice to illuminate and spotlight her, and to inform everyone that this one has value, this one over here, the one sitting in the bar by herself, and then to find her counterpart and bring him to her.

So, as always, Steve Martin knew exactly what he was doing when he "chose" the voice in which to tell Shopgirl. He chose an omniscient voice because that was what Mirabelle needed. Not omniscient as in distant - but omniscient as in knowing and seeing. The couple of times I have been loved, and truly loved, by a man ... it has seemed to me as though he had some omniscient understanding of me, my character, my hopes, my dreams ... He saw me when I could not see myself. He kept my dreams, my hopes in HIS mind ... because I had a tendency to forget. And so I could look to him and remember: Oh yes. THAT is who I am. He knows. This is a great power to give to someone (although, in the moment, it never feels like you are giving anyone power - it feels like they just HAVE that power ... and perhaps the experience is a mixture of the two) ... and in Shopgirl Martin tells a story where the power that omniscience gives someone can be dangerous ... and Mirabelle, fragile already, is shattered. To be seen and released by love after such a long dormant period ... and then to have it not come to full fruition ... Martin really really gets how devastating that situation is. He does not make it melodramatic. He does not dwell on Mirabelle's tear-soaked face. With almost cold elegant prose, he details what Mirabelle does, who she is ... and who Ray is and who Jeremy is ... and by the end of the book, I felt like I had been put through the wringer, but also that I had a deeper understanding of my own dangerous response to love, to an omniscient eye ... and the book also told me, gently, It'll be okay ... just hang in there ... breathe ... it'll be okay ...

Steve Martin knocked my socks off with Shopgirl. I guess I had never seen that side of him. He always seemed like a kind man, although a bit distant ... he never seemed self-destructive or self-involved ... but to write a book with that level of compassion and sensitivity and insight ... Wow.

He has also said that the Ray character (the one he ended up playing in the lovely movie of his book) is really the closest he has ever come to playing himself. Which is truly illuminating. Ray is cold, cut off, and yet, like most of us, wants human companionship. He wants it on his terms. He sees the lovely delicate girl behind the glove counter and begins to court her. She is way too young for him, but at a certain level of life, what does that matter? Ray is wealthy. Mirabelle is a failed artist who is a shopgirl and lives in a tiny apartment. It's not that he showers her with gifts, a la Pretty Woman. This is not a Cinderella story. He quietly insinuates himself into her life, but without ever seeming like a user, or creepy. He sees something in her. His interest in her is genuine. He has no intention of going the long haul with her, but for the time being, she is a nice companion. Mirabelle is in hiding. She is lost. Quiet, narrow, uptight. There is damage there, somewhere. Ray can't see it at first. By the time he does see it, it is too late. Mirabelle has been shattered by their love affair.

To see Martin in this role is to realize how limiting some of his film work has been. Seeing him in Disney-sponsored pater familias parts just never really worked for me (although I did like him in Parenthood - because there was an underbelly of anxiety and anger in that guy ... it seemed to fit with Martin's energy) ... I think Shopgirl is some of his best acting work. You've never seen such a Steve Martin. He's humorless, but not totally cold. He looks at Mirabelle, and he has enough distance from her (which ends up being the downfall) that he can see her, he can be that omniscient voice. But omniscience comes with responsibility ... Bah, I'm making the book sound preachy and drippy. It is not at all. It is a short spare volume of character development, quiet fragments, and perfect details. I am so admiring of him as a writer.

So I was beyond excited last year when Martin came out with a memoir of his time as a standup called Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. The book would not focus on his entire life, or his whole time on this planet. It would hone in on what happened to him in the 70s that put him into the pantheon, one of the most successful stand-up comics of all time - someone who, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not go the regular route. He was strictly underground. He has said that his success was more "rock and roll" than "comedic" ... meaning: he did not play the regular club circuit endlessly, he did not take a traditional route. His superstardom came like a meteor from outer space, but it was his own creation. Like grunge bands playing tiny clubs in Seattle and suddenly finding themselves playing Giants Stadium. That is not normally how a comic becomes famous, but that was what happened to Steve Martin. How?? Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life describes how.

It was, hands down, my favorite book I read last year.

Steve Martin details, step by intellectual step, the development of his style. It was not organic for him, ever. He was someone who had a lot of interests, who was incredibly geeky, but who wasn't really good at anything. He is quite honest about that. He wasn't really funny, he wasn't the best actor ... but he was fortunate enough, very early on, to find some mentors who basically fostered his geeky interests ... and so Steve Martin percolated. Over the years. As a child, his family moved right down the street from Disneyland - and it was that that changed his whole life. He got a job at the Magic Shop on Main Street, and so began his intense training in magic tricks. He was a teenager, behind the counter, entertaining tourists with magic tricks, and honing his craft.

He watched professional magicians, memorizing their moves. Most of the stuff he did early on, he stole. He lifted people's entire acts from them wholesale and recreated them, not realizing how bad that really is. He was just trying to learn. He started getting gigs - at local veterans' associations and the like ... and he would do magic. He kept copious meticulous notes (which he recreates in facsimile in his book) - he knew when something didn't work, so he would make note of it, to correct it the next time.

Leave out unncessary jokes, change patter for sq. circle, relax, don't shake.

I find these things, replete with misspellings, in shaky teenage-boy handwriting, very moving. He knew he was working on something, but he just wasn't sure what yet.

Martin writes in the book:

But there was a problem. At age eighteen, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

He was obsessed with things, and he didn't know why. He was obsessed with the banjo (he couldn't play, although he practiced like crazy), he was obsessed with magic, he was obsessed with balloon animals, he was obsessed with language ... It's an amazing book because you can see how everything he did later on was 100% deliberate. He didn't think, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the banjo?" He played the banjo because he had been obsessed with the banjo since he was 10 years old. Everything - everything - went into what would eventually become his act. But that was years in the making.

He got jobs in summer stock which was great for building confidence. He started mixing comedy in with magic ... but he realized instantly what worked and what didn't. He was like a mad scientist, or an alchemist, hovering over a bubbling cauldron. If I throw THIS in, will it work? Nothing was accidental. Everything was there for a purpose.

The book is fascinating - one of the best I have read about what is usually called the creative process. Everyone is different, and everyone has a mind that works in its own way ... so this is Steve Martin's excavation of his own mind, and how disparate elements came together ... slowly, adding this in, taking that out ... until he not only "broke through" - but shot upwards, into the stratosphere of entertainment. His shows grew. He had an underground following, strictly bootleg. Kind of like Metallica's early years, when their fame grew by the passing around of cassette tapes - because they weren't getting any radio play. Amazing. Johnny Carson took notice. He had him on The Tonight Show. And that was that. No turning back. Carson was unbelievably generous with up-and-coming comics and appearing on The Tonight Show was evidence that you had arrived. Steve Martin never was out of character. He did not sit and banter. He glowered, sneered, broke into hysterical silent laughter, danced like crazy - jiggling his body this way and that - always in his immaculate white suit which truly made him look like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. Someone who had once been a banker who tripped off the rails. He was like no one else. Lorne Michaels took notice. By that point, Martin was playing stadiums. It frightened him. The crowds were too big. He remembered the one night he was told 3,000 people were out there. He was like, "What?" Used to playing small clubs, he didn't know how his act would survive in such a huge arena. Then he was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

And the next time he asked someone, "How many people are out there tonight" he heard the unreal answer come back, "22,000."

Martin's breakdown of how he made it work, how he adjusted his act to fit the circumstances - all are a great tribute to his intellect, his smarts, his perseverance. He acted SO INSANE yet there he was buttoned-up in a suit like a Jehovah's Witness on your doorstep.

Martin writes:

I cut my hair, shaved my beard, and put on a suit. I stripped the act of all political references, which I felt was an act of defiance. To politics I was saying, "I'll get along without you very well. It's time to be funny." Overnight, I was no longer at the tail end of an old movement but at the front end of a new one. Instead of looking like another freak with a crazy act, I now looked like a visitor from the straight world who had gone seriously awry.

One of my favorite tidbits of information is about the famous white suit and how that came to be.

I worried about being seen at such distances - this was a small comedy act. For visibility, I bought a white suit to wear onstage. I was conflicted because the white suit had already been used by entertainers, including John Lennon. I was afraid it might seem derivative, but I stayed with it for practical reasons, and it didn't seem to matter to the audience or critics. The suit was made of gabardine, which always stayed fresh and flowed smoothly with my body. It got noticed in the press because it was three-piece, which appeared to be a symbol of conservatism, but I really wore the vest so my shirt would stay tucked in my pants.

Amazing. A practical choice, made to solve a problem (he needed to be visible on the stage in those giant stadiums) turned into an iconic looking-glass image of the counterculture.

Steve Martin, at the height of his standup fame, walked away. He has never looked back. Time and place, perhaps. He knew to throw in the towel when people would HOWL with despair, rather than overstay his welcome. That took guts. His is not a normal talent, it is not an ingratiating talent. It is his and his alone. He loved the audiences, yes, the energy in those arenas had to be amazing (you can feel it in the clips of concert footage) ... but eventually the energy came to be too much, he felt that his act started becoming "automatic" and that was death to him. He needed to shake things up again, walk away, and see what else was out there.

Here's an excerpt. This is from his years in college. Watch how methodical Martin is here, showing us the step by step process of his obsessions, and how that developed his mind and his ideas about what he thought was funny. He is the most intellectual of comics.

Best book of 2007.

EXCERPT FROM Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin

I continued to attend Long Beach State College, taking Stormie-inspired courses in metaphysics, ethics, and logic. New and exhilarating words such as "epistemology", "ontology", "pragmatism" and "existentialism" - words whose definitions alone were stimulating - swirled through my head and reconfigured my thinking. One semester I was taking Philosophy of Language, Continual Rationalism (whatever that is; what, Descartes?), History of Ethics, and to complete the group, Self-Defense, which I found especially humiliating when, one afternoon in class, I was nearly beaten up by a girl wearing boxing gloves. A course in music appreciation focused me on classical music, causing me to miss the pop music o my own era, so I got into the Beatles several years late. I was fixated on studying, and even though I kept my outside jobs, my drive for learning led to a significant improvement from my dismal high school grade average. I was now an A student. I switched to cotton pants called peggers, because I had vowed to grow up and abandon jeans. My look was strictly wholesome Baptist.

A friend lent me some comedy records. There were three by Nichols and May, several by Lenny Bruce, and one by Tom Lehrer, the great song parodist. Mike Nichols and Elaine May recorded without an audience, and I fixated on every nuance. Their comedy was sometimes created by only a subtle vocal shift: "Tell me Dr. Schweitzer, what is this reverence for life?" Lenny Bruce, on the records I heard, was doing mostly nonpolitical bits that were hilarious. Warden at a prison riot: "We're giving in to your demands, men! Except the vibrators!" Tom Lehrer influenced me with one bizarre joke: "My brother Henry was a nonconformist. To show you what a noncomformist he was, he spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y." Some people fall asleep at night listening to music; I fell asleep to Lenny, Tom and Mike and Elaine. These albums broke ground and led me to a Darwinian discovery: Comedy could evolve.

On campus I experienced two moments of illumination, both appropriately occurring in the bright sun. Now comfortable with indulging in overthinking, I was walking across the quad when a thought came to me, one that was nearly devastating. To implement the new concept called originality that I had been first introduced to in Showmanship for Magicians, and was now presenting itself again in my classes in literature, poetry, and philosophy, I would have to write everything in the act myself. Any line or idea with even a vague feeling of familiarity or provenance had to be expunged. There could be nothing that made the audience feel they weren't seeing something utterly new.

This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy - at all. But I did know I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, all pilfered from gag books and other people's routines, and consequently lose ten minutes from my already strained act. Worse, I would lose another prime gag I had lifted, Carl Ballantine's never-fail Appearing Dove, which had been appropriated by almost every comic magician under the age of twenty. Ballantine would blow up a paper bag and announce that he was going to produce a dove. "Come out flyin'!" he would say. Then he would pop the bag with his hands, and an anemic flutter of feathers would poof out from the sack. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.

I came up with several schemes for developing material. "I laugh in life," I thought, "so why not observe what it is that makes me laugh?" And if I did spot something that was funny, I decided not to just describe it as happening to someone else, but to translate it into the first person, so it was happening to me. A guy didn't walk into a bar, I did. I didn't want it to appear that others were nuts; I wanted it to appear that I was nuts.

Another method was to idly and abstractedly dream up bits. Sitting in a science class, I stared at the periodic table of the elements that hung behind the professor. That weekend I went onstage at the Ice House and announced, "And now I would like to do a dramatic reading of the periodic table of the elements. Fe ... Au ... He ..." I said. That bit didn't last long.

In logic class, I opened my textbook - the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration - and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
___________________________________________

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:

1. Babies are illogical.
2. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3. Illogical persons are despised.
___________________________________________

Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.

And:

1. No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
2. No modern poetry is free from affectation.
3. All your poems on the subject of soap bubbles.
4. No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.
5. Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.
___________________________________________

Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical - yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll's clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, "I'm not going home tonight; I'm going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green." Not at Lewis Carroll's level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction.

I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e.e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, "Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning.

The Books: "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" (Nick Tosches)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film writes of Tosches' book:

Nick Tosches' Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams is one of the great showbiz biographies. Its research is not just thorough, but lunatic, and perverse - for, plainly, Dean Martin had led a life indifferent or averse to recollection, accuracy, or fact. Dino is brilliant on the Lewis-Martin assocation, and inspired in its evocation of the drift, the haze, the numbing futility of being Dino, or being alive.

Tosches' book, while it covers all the details it needs to cover (Dean Martin's start as a singer, his immigrant upbringing - he didn't speak a word of English until he was 6 years old - his meeting with Jerry Lewis and how their particular brand of lunacy made them two of the biggest stars in the world, the breakup with Lewis, and Martin's surging off into a solo career - his friendship with Frank Sinatra and the other Rat Pack boys - his sketchy friendships with underworld characters - his marriages - particularly to Jeanne, the woman who stood by him until the end, even after they divorced - his family-man lifestyle - his highly successful television show - the "roasts" - the tragic death of his son - an event that Martin never recovered from - and then, suddenly, Dean Martin walking away from it all) - does not stop there. The details are just the jumping-off point for Tosches' deeper ruminations, all embodied in the persona of the man that we know of as Dean Martin. You get a great overview of Martin's journey, what it was that made him so special (as a comedian and also a singer - not to mention his potential as a dramatic actor - you need only to see Rio Bravo to understand how good he could be) ... but Tosches is up to something else in his book. It weaves a spell. It ends up being about the entirety of American life in the 20th century - its glory, its seedy side, its reliance on the energy of immigrants - the development of television and what that would really mean to the culture at large - the boomtown of Las Vegas, a truly grown-up playland in the middle of a desert ... the criminal element married to the legit element ... bootlegging and movie stars, poker games and Sunday School ...

Tosches goes deep into the metaphoric resonances of our lives, our experiences as a collective ... and then ... he goes even deeper than that - into an ongoing meditation of what it is to be a human being, the most sophisticated of animals ... and yet the most tragic, with our awareness of our own mortality. What does it mean to live one's life KNOWING that it will end? How does that form us? How does it develop us? We are not cookie-cutters - everyone deals with the reality of death in different ways.

Tosches sees something in Dean Martin - that he had an awareness of death on a cellular level ... it is not intellectual with him, it is known, and understood ... and it was that that distanced him from, well, everyone. No one really knew Dean Martin (according to Tosches). He remained apart. That was one of the reasons why he could be so unbelievably funny. He hovered above the action, seeming to react to it off the cuff, and you wondered (or at least I do, when I watch him): what exactly is he doing that is so funny? It's hard to point to it - it's especially hard to point to it when you are falling off the damn couch with laughter. His humor is subtle, sophisticated, reactive, and deeply human. I would imagine that he was always that funny - and it wasn't Jerry Lewis, per se, who brought it out of him (although you'd never know that from listening to Jerry talk!) ... It was that Dean Martin reacted to whatever person he was standing beside - with gentleness, acceptance, and a ribald sense of the absurd. He made fun of himself, but he never came off looking like just a clown. He was, along with George Burns, the ultimate straight man. It's hard to do with Dean Martin does. Or - it was easy for him ... but what he does cannot be taught. You have it, or you don't. Being a good straight man is having gold in the bank. There's probably one genius a generation in that particular field of show business. It's that difficult and that subtle.

I don't know if Dean Martin would even recognize himself from Tosches' majestic melancholy book ... but like I said, Tosches is up to something different here than a straight biography. It is a rumination on darkness (you can tell that from the title), it is a contemplation of America itself, and the intersection of show business and the underworld. It is a deeply philosophical book, and if you go into it looking for something more traditional, you will be deeply confused. Just give up your expectations. There are other biographies of Martin out there, but this is the one to read. Not just because Tosches really gets Martin's talent and is able to describe it (although that is true as well) ... but because it is spectacular writing. Writing so thick and good you want to scoop it up with a spoon.

Here's an example of the kind of prose that makes up the whole book:

His schoolmates had never really known him. Even his loving familiy could not tell for sure what lay within this kid who moseyed around among them with a hat on, singing. There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick. That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be. Unlettered and rough-cut, Dino possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years - anyone trying to fuck with his mind or his body or his soul found this out forthwith. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth and all such frail and flimsy lepidoptera would in their seasons emerge and thrive, wither and die. The sum of Dino's instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.

Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself.

There was a picnic in Beatty Park. Roozy had gotten hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, and they were all going to be in pictures. No one who saw that movie ever forgot it. The camera captured the silent laughter of the Crocettis and the Barrs. It followed Dino's friends back and forth as they ran and fumbled, threw and jumped in a makeshift football game. There was merriment everywhere, but there was no Dino. Then the camera scanned to the right, to a tree off in the distance, and there he was by himself under the tree, away from it all, caught unawares and expressionless, abstractedly toying with a twig, sort of mind-whittling it. That was Dino, all right; the Dino inside the Dino who sang and swore and loafed and laughed.

He was born alone. He would die alone. These truths, he, like every punk, took to heart. But in him they framed another truth, another solitary, stubborn stone in the eye of nothing. There was something, a knowing, in him that others did not apprehend. He was born alone, and he would die alone, yes. But in between -- somehow -- the world in all its glory would hunker down before him like a sweet-lipped High Street whore.

This, obviously, is not a regular book. Tosches sprinkles the book with Italian words, it is as though he is trying to imagine himself into Martin's psyche - not an easy thing to do on a normal day - because Martin was resistant to analysis and to self-reflection. He did not talk about what he did. He just did it.

His singing came easy to him. And that's one of the things that really gets me about Martin ... the beautiful smoothness of not only his voice, but his persona. His solo songs on his television show are works of art. He sits on the edge of a desk, staring into the camera, and sings. He doesn't overdo anything. Simplicity like that, the ability to not do too much is deeply vulnerable. He does not protect himself, he lets himself be soft, open, and connected to us. His voice would make you swoon - and that's what he wants. In a way, his was the most generous of the talents of the Rat Pack crowd ... it was a direct communication with his audience, in a way that was singular and set apart. Who knows if he knew how much he was loved, and if that made a difference to Dean Martin, and his experience of being Dean Martin. Nick Tosches surmises that it did not make a difference, that Dean Martin had something in him - an existential loneliness, a solitary mindset - that kept him from joining the world at large. Regardless of whether that is true or not, watching Dean Martin sing is to be in the presence of true grace, in my opinion. You can relax. You can be with him. He demands nothing from you except that you enjoy your own life while you are here. It's remarkable. Baffling, almost. Generosity of that sort in a performer, without the accompanying subtext of "Love me, love me, love me" is so rare as to be almost unheard of.

The couple of times that Martin got a chance to really act (The Young Lions, Rio Bravo) showed that when he put his mind to it - he could move out of his comfort zone. This man was such a giant and easy talent that his comfort zone was obviously enormous - he could be funny, he could be sentimental, he could be absolutely insane, he could do a "ba-dum-ching" line like nobody's business - he could do slapstick, gentle situation comedies, he was sexy - This is not a man who had a narrow path in which he operated. But outside of that enormous comfort zone was the realm of dramatic acting, ensemble acting ... It is hard to say what was going on inside of Dean Martin when preparing for these roles, but we only need to listen to the people who knew him, who had hired him, directors, co-stars ... who reference what a good person he was, what a collaborator, no bullshit, and also how hard he worked.

Here is the section in Tosches' book where Howard Hawks speaks of the entire experience of Dean Martin being cast in Rio Bravo (his best performance as an actor):

"I hired him," Hawks remembered, "because an agent wanted me to meet him. And I said, 'Well, get him around here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.' The agent said, 'He can't be here at nine.' So he came in about ten-thirty, and I said, 'Why the hell couldn't you be here at nine o'clock?' He said, 'I was working in Las Vegas, and I had to hire an airplane and fly down here.' And that made me think, 'Well, my Lord, this guy really wants to work.' So I said, 'You'd better go over and get some wardrobe.' He said, 'Am I hired?' And I said, 'Yeah. Anybody who'll do that ought to get a chance to do it.' He came back from wardrobe looking like a musical-comedy cowboy. I said, 'Dean, look, you know a little about drinking. You've seen a lot of drunks. I want a drunk. I want a guy in an old dirty sweatshirt and an old hat.' And he said, 'Okay, you don't have to tell me any more.' He went over, and he came back with the outfit that he wore in the picture. He must have been successful because Jack Warner said to me, 'We hired Dean Martin. When's he going to be in this picture?' I said, 'He's the funny-looking guy in the old hat.' 'Holy smoke, is that Dean Martin?'

"Dean did a great job. It was fun working with him. All you had to do was tell him something. The scene where he had a hangover, which he did in most of the scenes, there was one where he was suffering, and I said, 'Look, that's too damn polite. I knew a guy with a hangover who'd pound his leg trying to hurt himself and get some feeling in it.' 'Okay, I know that kind of guy,' he said. 'I can do it.' And he went on and did the scene with no rehearsal or anything."

For some reason, that makes me want to cry. "Okay, I know that kind of guy." He was an actor who was willing to listen, to give things a shot - even if they were scary or new to him - and who showed up when he needed to show up (by 'show up' I don't mean being on time, or being actually present - I mean "showing up" - with all your concentration and focus being put on the job at hand). Because Dean Martin was a guy to whom things came easy ... being put in a position where he might not know what to do or how to do it ... was daunting. He didn't do it often. There are stories of him before going to shoot The Young Lions and saying to a friend, "I'm so scared. I'm so scared." So what did Martin do? To deal with those nerves? He went and talked with Marlon Brando, his co-star, just to get some tips on ... you know ... how to act. Brando was generous with him, telling him to always make sure he was listening - to not plan too far ahead, to try to stay in the moment - and above all else: LISTEN. I love Brando's generosity there, but I also love that Martin, a GIANT star, knew that he was a bit out of his element, and instead of struggling in silence, or trying to fake it - hoping we would buy it - OR not even realizing he was out of his element, and doing a bad job blithely - thinking it was awesome ... Martin went privately to talk to the greatest actor at the time, and said, "Hey, man, can you help me out?"

That's a pro.

Another thing that I love Dean Martin for is how he put his own career on the line when Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give - a movie he was co-starring in. This was in the last couple of months of Monroe's life, and large forces were at work in the studio (which was in the process of collapsing) - and Monroe was one of the ones who took the fall. Martin had signed on to do the picture with Monroe, and when he heard she had been fired, he walked off the picture. Nothing anyone said could dissuade him. The big-wigs begged, pleaded, cajoled, threw money at him. Nope. Nope. Nope. It was a PR nightmare for everyone involved ... the studio knew Monroe was beloved by the public, and it did its best to paint a picture of her as a drugged-out mess ... regardless of whether or not that was the truth ... and so they needed Martin to shut the fuck up, and be a good team player, and continue on to do the movie with Lee Remick - the replacement. But Martin would not budge.

He had been friends with Monroe for years, obviously - but more was going on than that. Marilyn Monroe was still one of the biggest stars in the world. Yes, she had some problems, but didn't we all? Martin was kind to those who were weaker (in whatever ways). Monroe was a damaged girl, sure, but she was box office gold, and he was going to do the movie with her, or with no one. Martin put the studio execs in a hell of a spot. I love him for it. In Marilyn: The Last Take, the book that describes those final two months of Monroe's life, the authors, Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham, write:

Snyder approached Martin, who was still in golf clothes from a noon game at the Los Angeles Country Club. "Dean, I think they've fired Marilyn," Snyder said.

"What?" Martin said.

"Then Dean had his assistant run to the production to verify the story," Snyder remembered.

A few minutes later, the assistant was back. "Yep," he said. "Monroe has been fired and Lee Remick's going to be your leading lady."

Martin put his putter down, grabbed his coat and headed for the Fox parking lot. Snyder walked part of the way with him. "Whitey, I made a contract to do this picture with Marilyn Monroe," Martin said. "That's the deal; the only deal. We're not going to be doing it with Lee Remick or any other actress."

When Martin arrived home half an hour later, Vernon Scott, the Hollywood reporter for United Press International, coaxed a brief interview out of him. Martin told Scott that he had walked off the set and didn't plan to return. "I have the greatest respect for Miss Remick as an actress," Martin continued. "But I signed to do this film with Marilyn Monroe."

Shortly after 6 pm, the UPI wires broadcast this bulletin: "Dean Martin quit the Twentieth Century-Fox film because Marilyn Monroe was fired."

... Dean Martin never elaborated on his reasons for putting his career and his future on the line for Monroe, but it was typical of a man whose on-screen image as an easygoing good guy was identical to his off-screen persona. An ex-prizefighter and ex-cardsharp, Martin had been laboring in a steel mill when he began singing nights and weekends in small clubs. After he teamed up with frenetic comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946, he assumed the role of a handsome, not-so-bright straight man. The Martin and Lewis partnership endured for ten years, eleven films and a thousand appearances in nightclubs.

When the partnership collapsed in the mid-fifties, many Hollywood producers thought Maritn wouldn't survive as a solo act. But half a dozen number-one hits, including "Volare" and "Memories Are Made of This", smoothed his way to film and television superstardom. In 1958, his role in Some Came Running opposite fellow "Rat Packers" Sinatra and MacLaine proved his value as a dramatic star.

However predictable, Martin's loyalty to Monroe was far from popular. "Nasty sayings were scrawled on his dressing-room door," production secretary Lee Hanna remembered. "By insisting on Monroe, it seemed as if the film would shut down for good - with the loss of one hundred and four jobs."

Hedda Hopper warned the actor in her Los Angeles Times column. "The unions are taking a dim view of Dean Martin's walkout," Hopper wrote. She quoted a union official as saying, "Dean's putting people out of work at a time when we are all faced with unemployment." ...

Levathes, who flew back to Los Angeles on Sunday, was determined to change Martin's mind but, just in case, had Ferguson begin drafting a $5.6 million lawsuit "for breach of contract".

The three-hour meeting among Feldman, Levathes, Frank Ferguson, Martin and Herman Citron was an exercise in frustration. The executives were determined to sell Remick to the increasingly skeptical actor.

When Feldman tried to verbally recap Martin's "rejection of Remick," Martin interrupted him, saying, "I didn't turn down Miss Remick. I simply said that I will not do the film without Marilyn Monroe. There is a big difference between the two statements."

Levathes countered, "What kind of position does that put our investment in?"

Martin answered, "That's not a fair question to ask me. I have no quarrel with anyone."

Levathes forged ahead. "We think Miss Remick is of adequate stature," he said. "After all, she has appeared with Jack Lemmon [in Days of Wine and Roses] with James Stewart [in Anatomy of a Murder], and with Glenn Ford [in Experiment in Terror]."

Martin patiently explained that he had taken the role mainly because "the chemistry between Miss Monroe and myself was right." The actor also said that the whole point of Something's Got to Give was Martin's desertion of his new bride, Cyd Charisse, for Monroe, which was something which wouldn't happen, Martin said, "with Lee Remick."

The production chief disagreed. "This story is a warm situation in which the husband, with his children, loved his former wife, but was caught in an embarrassing position because he had remarried," said Levathes. "This is not the case of a man who chucks one woman for a sexpot."

Martin shook his head.

The situation went round and round, a total impasse. It was never resolved. It might have been, had Monroe lived, there were rumblings that she would be re-instated - but it was not meant to be. She died in August, 1962, a mere 2 months after she had been fired. In those crazy last months, as her friends fell away (and as she fired her staff, left and right, trying to get rid of the sycophant suckers all around her) - Dean Martin stood up for her. He put his career and reputation on the line.

He could not be swayed.

Tosches, in his book, seems interested most of all in that part of Dean Martin that could not be swayed. It was that element of Martin's character that drove his friend Frank Sinatra up the wall. Sinatra (at least in Tosches' version) always needed more from Martin than Martin could give. Sinatra was baffled and hurt when Martin decided to stop performing (in the middle of a tour!) - how could he just walk out? How could he not realize his obligations - not just to the tour but to their friendship? Martin did not recognize those obligations. He was done. His heart had been shattered by the death of his son. All he wanted to do in his old age was sit on the couch and watch Westerns on television. And that's what he did.

But that implacable element of Martin's personality was always there - it was what made him such an acutely funny and perfect straight man ... it was what made him a heartbreaker to the women who loved him ... and it was what made him a star.

The excerpt I chose today from Tosches' brilliant book has to do with the Martin-Lewis dynamic, particularly their first live shows - which were legendary. Martin and Lewis would take the show out into the parking lot - and the entire audience at a nightclub would follow them outside, and watch as the two of them went absolutely insane in the parking lot - messing with cars, valet drivers, chasing each other - whatever - these were electric shows. No record of them exist. But that's okay. There's no record of Edmund Kean playing Richard III or Shylock, either. Doesn't mean I don't believe it was a great performance - just because I personally didn't see it. What happened between the two of them in the live shows was one-for-the-ages ... and it transferred to radio, to television, to movies ... in an unstoppable juggernaut. An amazingly successful collaboration - and Tosches, in that way that he has - a prose styling all his own - really is able to capture what it was in that dynamic that was so resonant, so deep.

Below the jump, I have included an image of the bill the famous night in Atlantic City, 1946, when Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin met. Jerry Lewis was doing impressions, and Dean Martin was singing. There they are on the bill - their names separate - having no idea (although it became apparent immediately) what they would be to one another.

I have also included below the jump one of my favorite clips from Dean Martin's TV show: him and John Wayne singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime". Those two guys loved each other, that is obvious - I love how funny Wayne is, how generous Martin is with Wayne's funniness - giving him the props when deserved - and also how he sets Wayne up to look like a million bucks. Not that that is difficult - Wayne was another guy who seemed comfortable wherever he was ... but watch how Martin HANDS the entire sketch to Wayne, letting Wayne be the funny one, letting Wayne take it away. It's glorious!! (I love what Wayne does with his body and his face at around the 1:20 mark ... it makes me laugh out loud. So stupid!!) But even with the silliness of it, even with the goofball nature of these two big swaggering guys singing a love song to one another - not to mention the fact that John Wayne - John Wayne! - is LIP SYNCHING ... there's a beauty here, a real slice of Americana ... the innocence and pleasure of our entertainment, the thing that more jaded cultures sneer at us for ... the open-faced enthusiasm of who we can be, at our best ... something that I will never feel shame about. I think it is our greatest asset. And here it is - in Wayne and Martin - writ large.

And finally, I will end this post on Dean Martin - one of my favorite entertainers of all time - with some words from my brother Brendan. Brendan has a way of capturing what it is, what it really is, about a performer ... the essence - not just in who the performer is - but the response the performer engenders in an audience - and I love his words here.

I remember seeing the Dean Martin roasts and being scared, like a drunk friend of a drunk uncle had showed up unannounced at a dinner party and started shoe-horning everyone into singing along to perverted folk songs. I didn't know what he was famous for and those roasts seemed to hint that he didn't really know why either.

Then, years later as a grownup, I heard "Ain't That A Kick In the Head" in some movie, or in a bar. That's really all you need to do...just listen to that song a few times in a row. It all seems like a joke. Then you start to hear how well he sings the song. Then you realize that someone could have completely fouled the song up. It isn't a very good song, actually. Think about all the classic standards. Everybody does 'em. But is there another famous version of that song? If there is, I haven't heard it.

How does he turn a mediocre song around? He doesn't sound all that invested in the heartbreak aspect of it, there isn't irony dripping all over the place. I still can't quite place what makes the song work so well. But I'm going to try:

His presence and personality are so evident that you don't even need the song. He has sung the song out of existence. All you want to do is hear him make a rumble in his throat and roll his eyes about how much trouble a broad can be. You also somehow realize that no broad ever caused him too much trouble. He causes them trouble. And they love it.

It is almost a taunt. What could be a stupid jokey brushoff of heartache turns into a come-on. It is a magic trick.

Another thing that strikes me about Dean Martin is that you get the sense that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a truck driver, a grocer, a whatever. Most of the other stars of that era seem to have been transformed in some way by fame and what came along with it. This guy could have strolled around the streets of Rome with his jacket over his shoulder and 10 bucks in his pocket and it would make no difference to him.

The most underrated of all time.

EXCERPT FROM Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches

The Desert Inn was still several months away from opening when Dean and Jerry arrived in September 1949. The Flamingo was still the jewel of that stretch of Highway 91 that came to be called the Strip. The Rex Cigar Store, the Jungle Inn, the 500 Club, the Riviera - the great and gaudy neon cathedral of the Flamingo was all these joints exalted. Here, married by God and by state, anointed in the blood of Bugsy Siegel, Unterwelt and American dream lay down together in greed.

Martin and Lewis by now were among the beloved of that dream, embracing and embraced by the spirit of a post-heroic, post-literate, cathode-culture America. The Flamingo was the pleasure dome of the new prefab promised land: a land of chrome, not gold; of Armstrong linoleum, not Carrara marble; of heptalk, not epos of prophecy.

Martin and Lewis were the jesters of that land. Time magazine, then as always the cutting edge of lumpen-American mediocrity, the vox populi of the modern world, celebrated the dazzling appeal of their hilarity. The heart of their audience, the nightclub clientele whose reduction to a quivering mass of thunderous yockers Variety attested again and again, was sophisticated, white-collared, and well-heeled. The sophisticated, white-collared, and well-heeled New York Times itself, in an article published while Martin and Lewis were in Las Vegas, hailed their "refreshing brand of comic hysteria," their "wild and uninhibited imagination".

And yet, these few years later, the nature of that appeal is as alien and as difficult to translate as the language, syntax, and meter of Catallus. There are no films or tapes of their nightclub act. Only secondary fragments have survived to be judged: glimpses of routines reworked for pictures, such as the "Donkey Serenade" scene in My Friend Irma, and for pale renderings on radio; a few rare kinescopes of television broadcasts, none of them predating 1952. Those fragments convey almost nothing of the dazzling appeal of that hilarity proclaimed in contemporary accounts. And yet the howling laughter present in many of those fragments, in the radio shows and television performances, all done before live spectators, is unanswerable. Those spectators, who had lined up for free shows at network studios, were not the same urbane nightclub-goers who howled at the Copacabana or Chez Paree or the Flamingo. Their sense of yockery was perhaps homelier; but, on the other hand, it was less primed by booze. Jerry was right: Martin and Lewis appealed to everyone. But why?

"Let us not be deceived," the New York Times had declared in April 1947, while Dean and Jerry had been playing at the Loew's Capitol; "we are today in the midst of a cold war." Now, in September 1949, while they were in Las Vegas, President Truman, the first president to have a televised inauguration, revealed that the Soviet Union had set off an atomic-bomb explosion. A week later, on October 1, Chairman Mao Tse-tung would formally proclaim the Communist People's Republic of China. In January, Truman would order the development of the hydrogen bomb. Six months later, United States ground troops would invade South Korea. "Let us not be deceived" -- but America wanted nothing more than to be deceived. Martin and Lewis gave them that: not laughter in the dark, but a denial of darkness itself, a regression, a transporting to the preternatural bliss of infantile senselessness. It was a catharsis, a celebration of ignorance, absurdity, and stupidity, as meaningless, as primitive-seeming, and as droll today as the fallout shelters and beatnik posings which offered opposing sanctuary in those days so close in time but so distant in consciousness.

Those days were the beginning of the end of timelessness. Homer's Odyssey spoke throughout the ages; Kerouac's American odyssey, On the Road, would have a shelf life, and would prove after a handful of years more outdated and stale than Homer after thousands. But like the detergent on the shelf in that other supermarket aisle, it was for the moment new and improved; and that is what mattered. And that is why the dead-serious pretensions of Kerouac today seem so droll while the comedy of that same necrophiliac era seems so unfunny.

Dean, of course, had no use for any of this shit. He did not know the new and improved from the old and well-worn. Homer, Sorelli the Mystic: it was all the same shit to him. The Trojan War, World War II, the Cold War, what the fuck did he care? His hernia was bigger than history itself. He cared as much about Korea as Korea cared about his fucking hernia. He walked through his own world. And that world was as much a part of what commanded those audiences as the catharsis of the absurd slapstick; and it would continue to command, long after that catharsis, like a forgotten mystery rite, had lost all meaning and power. His uncaring air of romance reflected the flash and breezy sweet seductions of a world in which everything came down to broads, booze, and money, with plenty of linguine on the side. There was a beckoning to join him in the Lethe of the old ways' woods that appealed to the lover, the menefreghista, the rotten cocksucker, the sweet-hearted dreamer in everyone.

Mickey Cohen, a brutal killer who "got kind of friendly with him," said that "Dean would've been in the rackets if he didn't have the beautiful voice that he has. He probably would've ended up a gambling boss somewhere. I'd say Dean had the perfect makeup to be a racket guy, although he is a little too lackadaisical, if you know what I mean."

Love was Dean's racket. The traits he shared with the Fischettis and the Anastasias - that lontananza, that dark self-serving moralita - were never far beneath the surface of whatever sweet spell he meant to cast. Whatever talent he had, whatever he worked at, whatever was God-given and whatever manufactured, that much, that darkness beneath the spell, was immanent and intractable and ever-there.

Frank Sinatra, who had sung at the Nacional during the Havana yuletide gathering of 1946, was a malavita groupy, a scrawny mama's boy who liked to pretend he was a tough guy. He cultivated the company of, and catered to, men such as the Fischettis. But it was Dean, so aloof and yet seemingly so kindred, to whom those men themselves were drawn.

"They loved him," Jerry said. "But they knew that he wasn't the one to talk to on a business basis. He had his way of getting that clear to them. I would say he was the most brilliant diplomat I've ever known. I used to hear things like 'Talk to the Jew,' 'Talk to the kid,' 'Talk to the little one.' "

The Books: "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" (Nick Tosches)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film writes of Tosches' book:

Nick Tosches' Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams is one of the great showbiz biographies. Its research is not just thorough, but lunatic, and perverse - for, plainly, Dean Martin had led a life indifferent or averse to recollection, accuracy, or fact. Dino is brilliant on the Lewis-Martin assocation, and inspired in its evocation of the drift, the haze, the numbing futility of being Dino, or being alive.

Tosches' book, while it covers all the details it needs to cover (Dean Martin's start as a singer, his immigrant upbringing - he didn't speak a word of English until he was 6 years old - his meeting with Jerry Lewis and how their particular brand of lunacy made them two of the biggest stars in the world, the breakup with Lewis, and Martin's surging off into a solo career - his friendship with Frank Sinatra and the other Rat Pack boys - his sketchy friendships with underworld characters - his marriages - particularly to Jeanne, the woman who stood by him until the end, even after they divorced - his family-man lifestyle - his highly successful television show - the "roasts" - the tragic death of his son - an event that Martin never recovered from - and then, suddenly, Dean Martin walking away from it all) - does not stop there. The details are just the jumping-off point for Tosches' deeper ruminations, all embodied in the persona of the man that we know of as Dean Martin. You get a great overview of Martin's journey, what it was that made him so special (as a comedian and also a singer - not to mention his potential as a dramatic actor - you need only to see Rio Bravo to understand how good he could be) ... but Tosches is up to something else in his book. It weaves a spell. It ends up being about the entirety of American life in the 20th century - its glory, its seedy side, its reliance on the energy of immigrants - the development of television and what that would really mean to the culture at large - the boomtown of Las Vegas, a truly grown-up playland in the middle of a desert ... the criminal element married to the legit element ... bootlegging and movie stars, poker games and Sunday School ...

Tosches goes deep into the metaphoric resonances of our lives, our experiences as a collective ... and then ... he goes even deeper than that - into an ongoing meditation of what it is to be a human being, the most sophisticated of animals ... and yet the most tragic, with our awareness of our own mortality. What does it mean to live one's life KNOWING that it will end? How does that form us? How does it develop us? We are not cookie-cutters - everyone deals with the reality of death in different ways.

Tosches sees something in Dean Martin - that he had an awareness of death on a cellular level ... it is not intellectual with him, it is known, and understood ... and it was that that distanced him from, well, everyone. No one really knew Dean Martin (according to Tosches). He remained apart. That was one of the reasons why he could be so unbelievably funny. He hovered above the action, seeming to react to it off the cuff, and you wondered (or at least I do, when I watch him): what exactly is he doing that is so funny? It's hard to point to it - it's especially hard to point to it when you are falling off the damn couch with laughter. His humor is subtle, sophisticated, reactive, and deeply human. I would imagine that he was always that funny - and it wasn't Jerry Lewis, per se, who brought it out of him (although you'd never know that from listening to Jerry talk!) ... It was that Dean Martin reacted to whatever person he was standing beside - with gentleness, acceptance, and a ribald sense of the absurd. He made fun of himself, but he never came off looking like just a clown. He was, along with George Burns, the ultimate straight man. It's hard to do with Dean Martin does. Or - it was easy for him ... but what he does cannot be taught. You have it, or you don't. Being a good straight man is having gold in the bank. There's probably one genius a generation in that particular field of show business. It's that difficult and that subtle.

I don't know if Dean Martin would even recognize himself from Tosches' majestic melancholy book ... but like I said, Tosches is up to something different here than a straight biography. It is a rumination on darkness (you can tell that from the title), it is a contemplation of America itself, and the intersection of show business and the underworld. It is a deeply philosophical book, and if you go into it looking for something more traditional, you will be deeply confused. Just give up your expectations. There are other biographies of Martin out there, but this is the one to read. Not just because Tosches really gets Martin's talent and is able to describe it (although that is true as well) ... but because it is spectacular writing. Writing so thick and good you want to scoop it up with a spoon.

Here's an example of the kind of prose that makes up the whole book:

His schoolmates had never really known him. Even his loving familiy could not tell for sure what lay within this kid who moseyed around among them with a hat on, singing. There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick. That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be. Unlettered and rough-cut, Dino possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years - anyone trying to fuck with his mind or his body or his soul found this out forthwith. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth and all such frail and flimsy lepidoptera would in their seasons emerge and thrive, wither and die. The sum of Dino's instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.

Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself.

There was a picnic in Beatty Park. Roozy had gotten hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, and they were all going to be in pictures. No one who saw that movie ever forgot it. The camera captured the silent laughter of the Crocettis and the Barrs. It followed Dino's friends back and forth as they ran and fumbled, threw and jumped in a makeshift football game. There was merriment everywhere, but there was no Dino. Then the camera scanned to the right, to a tree off in the distance, and there he was by himself under the tree, away from it all, caught unawares and expressionless, abstractedly toying with a twig, sort of mind-whittling it. That was Dino, all right; the Dino inside the Dino who sang and swore and loafed and laughed.

He was born alone. He would die alone. These truths, he, like every punk, took to heart. But in him they framed another truth, another solitary, stubborn stone in the eye of nothing. There was something, a knowing, in him that others did not apprehend. He was born alone, and he would die alone, yes. But in between -- somehow -- the world in all its glory would hunker down before him like a sweet-lipped High Street whore.

This, obviously, is not a regular book. Tosches sprinkles the book with Italian words, it is as though he is trying to imagine himself into Martin's psyche - not an easy thing to do on a normal day - because Martin was resistant to analysis and to self-reflection. He did not talk about what he did. He just did it.

His singing came easy to him. And that's one of the things that really gets me about Martin ... the beautiful smoothness of not only his voice, but his persona. His solo songs on his television show are works of art. He sits on the edge of a desk, staring into the camera, and sings. He doesn't overdo anything. Simplicity like that, the ability to not do too much is deeply vulnerable. He does not protect himself, he lets himself be soft, open, and connected to us. His voice would make you swoon - and that's what he wants. In a way, his was the most generous of the talents of the Rat Pack crowd ... it was a direct communication with his audience, in a way that was singular and set apart. Who knows if he knew how much he was loved, and if that made a difference to Dean Martin, and his experience of being Dean Martin. Nick Tosches surmises that it did not make a difference, that Dean Martin had something in him - an existential loneliness, a solitary mindset - that kept him from joining the world at large. Regardless of whether that is true or not, watching Dean Martin sing is to be in the presence of true grace, in my opinion. You can relax. You can be with him. He demands nothing from you except that you enjoy your own life while you are here. It's remarkable. Baffling, almost. Generosity of that sort in a performer, without the accompanying subtext of "Love me, love me, love me" is so rare as to be almost unheard of.

The couple of times that Martin got a chance to really act (The Young Lions, Rio Bravo) showed that when he put his mind to it - he could move out of his comfort zone. This man was such a giant and easy talent that his comfort zone was obviously enormous - he could be funny, he could be sentimental, he could be absolutely insane, he could do a "ba-dum-ching" line like nobody's business - he could do slapstick, gentle situation comedies, he was sexy - This is not a man who had a narrow path in which he operated. But outside of that enormous comfort zone was the realm of dramatic acting, ensemble acting ... It is hard to say what was going on inside of Dean Martin when preparing for these roles, but we only need to listen to the people who knew him, who had hired him, directors, co-stars ... who reference what a good person he was, what a collaborator, no bullshit, and also how hard he worked.

Here is the section in Tosches' book where Howard Hawks speaks of the entire experience of Dean Martin being cast in Rio Bravo (his best performance as an actor):

"I hired him," Hawks remembered, "because an agent wanted me to meet him. And I said, 'Well, get him around here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.' The agent said, 'He can't be here at nine.' So he came in about ten-thirty, and I said, 'Why the hell couldn't you be here at nine o'clock?' He said, 'I was working in Las Vegas, and I had to hire an airplane and fly down here.' And that made me think, 'Well, my Lord, this guy really wants to work.' So I said, 'You'd better go over and get some wardrobe.' He said, 'Am I hired?' And I said, 'Yeah. Anybody who'll do that ought to get a chance to do it.' He came back from wardrobe looking like a musical-comedy cowboy. I said, 'Dean, look, you know a little about drinking. You've seen a lot of drunks. I want a drunk. I want a guy in an old dirty sweatshirt and an old hat.' And he said, 'Okay, you don't have to tell me any more.' He went over, and he came back with the outfit that he wore in the picture. He must have been successful because Jack Warner said to me, 'We hired Dean Martin. When's he going to be in this picture?' I said, 'He's the funny-looking guy in the old hat.' 'Holy smoke, is that Dean Martin?'

"Dean did a great job. It was fun working with him. All you had to do was tell him something. The scene where he had a hangover, which he did in most of the scenes, there was one where he was suffering, and I said, 'Look, that's too damn polite. I knew a guy with a hangover who'd pound his leg trying to hurt himself and get some feeling in it.' 'Okay, I know that kind of guy,' he said. 'I can do it.' And he went on and did the scene with no rehearsal or anything."

For some reason, that makes me want to cry. "Okay, I know that kind of guy." He was an actor who was willing to listen, to give things a shot - even if they were scary or new to him - and who showed up when he needed to show up (by 'show up' I don't mean being on time, or being actually present - I mean "showing up" - with all your concentration and focus being put on the job at hand). Because Dean Martin was a guy to whom things came easy ... being put in a position where he might not know what to do or how to do it ... was daunting. He didn't do it often. There are stories of him before going to shoot The Young Lions and saying to a friend, "I'm so scared. I'm so scared." So what did Martin do? To deal with those nerves? He went and talked with Marlon Brando, his co-star, just to get some tips on ... you know ... how to act. Brando was generous with him, telling him to always make sure he was listening - to not plan too far ahead, to try to stay in the moment - and above all else: LISTEN. I love Brando's generosity there, but I also love that Martin, a GIANT star, knew that he was a bit out of his element, and instead of struggling in silence, or trying to fake it - hoping we would buy it - OR not even realizing he was out of his element, and doing a bad job blithely - thinking it was awesome ... Martin went privately to talk to the greatest actor at the time, and said, "Hey, man, can you help me out?"

That's a pro.

Another thing that I love Dean Martin for is how he put his own career on the line when Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give - a movie he was co-starring in. This was in the last couple of months of Monroe's life, and large forces were at work in the studio (which was in the process of collapsing) - and Monroe was one of the ones who took the fall. Martin had signed on to do the picture with Monroe, and when he heard she had been fired, he walked off the picture. Nothing anyone said could dissuade him. The big-wigs begged, pleaded, cajoled, threw money at him. Nope. Nope. Nope. It was a PR nightmare for everyone involved ... the studio knew Monroe was beloved by the public, and it did its best to paint a picture of her as a drugged-out mess ... regardless of whether or not that was the truth ... and so they needed Martin to shut the fuck up, and be a good team player, and continue on to do the movie with Lee Remick - the replacement. But Martin would not budge.

He had been friends with Monroe for years, obviously - but more was going on than that. Marilyn Monroe was still one of the biggest stars in the world. Yes, she had some problems, but didn't we all? Martin was kind to those who were weaker (in whatever ways). Monroe was a damaged girl, sure, but she was box office gold, and he was going to do the movie with her, or with no one. Martin put the studio execs in a hell of a spot. I love him for it. In Marilyn: The Last Take, the book that describes those final two months of Monroe's life, the authors, Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham, write:

Snyder approached Martin, who was still in golf clothes from a noon game at the Los Angeles Country Club. "Dean, I think they've fired Marilyn," Snyder said.

"What?" Martin said.

"Then Dean had his assistant run to the production to verify the story," Snyder remembered.

A few minutes later, the assistant was back. "Yep," he said. "Monroe has been fired and Lee Remick's going to be your leading lady."

Martin put his putter down, grabbed his coat and headed for the Fox parking lot. Snyder walked part of the way with him. "Whitey, I made a contract to do this picture with Marilyn Monroe," Martin said. "That's the deal; the only deal. We're not going to be doing it with Lee Remick or any other actress."

When Martin arrived home half an hour later, Vernon Scott, the Hollywood reporter for United Press International, coaxed a brief interview out of him. Martin told Scott that he had walked off the set and didn't plan to return. "I have the greatest respect for Miss Remick as an actress," Martin continued. "But I signed to do this film with Marilyn Monroe."

Shortly after 6 pm, the UPI wires broadcast this bulletin: "Dean Martin quit the Twentieth Century-Fox film because Marilyn Monroe was fired."

... Dean Martin never elaborated on his reasons for putting his career and his future on the line for Monroe, but it was typical of a man whose on-screen image as an easygoing good guy was identical to his off-screen persona. An ex-prizefighter and ex-cardsharp, Martin had been laboring in a steel mill when he began singing nights and weekends in small clubs. After he teamed up with frenetic comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946, he assumed the role of a handsome, not-so-bright straight man. The Martin and Lewis partnership endured for ten years, eleven films and a thousand appearances in nightclubs.

When the partnership collapsed in the mid-fifties, many Hollywood producers thought Maritn wouldn't survive as a solo act. But half a dozen number-one hits, including "Volare" and "Memories Are Made of This", smoothed his way to film and television superstardom. In 1958, his role in Some Came Running opposite fellow "Rat Packers" Sinatra and MacLaine proved his value as a dramatic star.

However predictable, Martin's loyalty to Monroe was far from popular. "Nasty sayings were scrawled on his dressing-room door," production secretary Lee Hanna remembered. "By insisting on Monroe, it seemed as if the film would shut down for good - with the loss of one hundred and four jobs."

Hedda Hopper warned the actor in her Los Angeles Times column. "The unions are taking a dim view of Dean Martin's walkout," Hopper wrote. She quoted a union official as saying, "Dean's putting people out of work at a time when we are all faced with unemployment." ...

Levathes, who flew back to Los Angeles on Sunday, was determined to change Martin's mind but, just in case, had Ferguson begin drafting a $5.6 million lawsuit "for breach of contract".

The three-hour meeting among Feldman, Levathes, Frank Ferguson, Martin and Herman Citron was an exercise in frustration. The executives were determined to sell Remick to the increasingly skeptical actor.

When Feldman tried to verbally recap Martin's "rejection of Remick," Martin interrupted him, saying, "I didn't turn down Miss Remick. I simply said that I will not do the film without Marilyn Monroe. There is a big difference between the two statements."

Levathes countered, "What kind of position does that put our investment in?"

Martin answered, "That's not a fair question to ask me. I have no quarrel with anyone."

Levathes forged ahead. "We think Miss Remick is of adequate stature," he said. "After all, she has appeared with Jack Lemmon [in Days of Wine and Roses] with James Stewart [in Anatomy of a Murder], and with Glenn Ford [in Experiment in Terror]."

Martin patiently explained that he had taken the role mainly because "the chemistry between Miss Monroe and myself was right." The actor also said that the whole point of Something's Got to Give was Martin's desertion of his new bride, Cyd Charisse, for Monroe, which was something which wouldn't happen, Martin said, "with Lee Remick."

The production chief disagreed. "This story is a warm situation in which the husband, with his children, loved his former wife, but was caught in an embarrassing position because he had remarried," said Levathes. "This is not the case of a man who chucks one woman for a sexpot."

Martin shook his head.

The situation went round and round, a total impasse. It was never resolved. It might have been, had Monroe lived, there were rumblings that she would be re-instated - but it was not meant to be. She died in August, 1962, a mere 2 months after she had been fired. In those crazy last months, as her friends fell away (and as she fired her staff, left and right, trying to get rid of the sycophant suckers all around her) - Dean Martin stood up for her. He put his career and reputation on the line.

He could not be swayed.

Tosches, in his book, seems interested most of all in that part of Dean Martin that could not be swayed. It was that element of Martin's character that drove his friend Frank Sinatra up the wall. Sinatra (at least in Tosches' version) always needed more from Martin than Martin could give. Sinatra was baffled and hurt when Martin decided to stop performing (in the middle of a tour!) - how could he just walk out? How could he not realize his obligations - not just to the tour but to their friendship? Martin did not recognize those obligations. He was done. His heart had been shattered by the death of his son. All he wanted to do in his old age was sit on the couch and watch Westerns on television. And that's what he did.

But that implacable element of Martin's personality was always there - it was what made him such an acutely funny and perfect straight man ... it was what made him a heartbreaker to the women who loved him ... and it was what made him a star.

The excerpt I chose today from Tosches' brilliant book has to do with the Martin-Lewis dynamic, particularly their first live shows - which were legendary. Martin and Lewis would take the show out into the parking lot - and the entire audience at a nightclub would follow them outside, and watch as the two of them went absolutely insane in the parking lot - messing with cars, valet drivers, chasing each other - whatever - these were electric shows. No record of them exist. But that's okay. There's no record of Edmund Kean playing Richard III or Shylock, either. Doesn't mean I don't believe it was a great performance - just because I personally didn't see it. What happened between the two of them in the live shows was one-for-the-ages ... and it transferred to radio, to television, to movies ... in an unstoppable juggernaut. An amazingly successful collaboration - and Tosches, in that way that he has - a prose styling all his own - really is able to capture what it was in that dynamic that was so resonant, so deep.

Below the jump, I have included an image of the bill the famous night in Atlantic City, 1946, when Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin met. Jerry Lewis was doing impressions, and Dean Martin was singing. There they are on the bill - their names separate - having no idea (although it became apparent immediately) what they would be to one another.

I have also included below the jump one of my favorite clips from Dean Martin's TV show: him and John Wayne singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime". Those two guys loved each other, that is obvious - I love how funny Wayne is, how generous Martin is with Wayne's funniness - giving him the props when deserved - and also how he sets Wayne up to look like a million bucks. Not that that is difficult - Wayne was another guy who seemed comfortable wherever he was ... but watch how Martin HANDS the entire sketch to Wayne, letting Wayne be the funny one, letting Wayne take it away. It's glorious!! (I love what Wayne does with his body and his face at around the 1:20 mark ... it makes me laugh out loud. So stupid!!) But even with the silliness of it, even with the goofball nature of these two big swaggering guys singing a love song to one another - not to mention the fact that John Wayne - John Wayne! - is LIP SYNCHING ... there's a beauty here, a real slice of Americana ... the innocence and pleasure of our entertainment, the thing that more jaded cultures sneer at us for ... the open-faced enthusiasm of who we can be, at our best ... something that I will never feel shame about. I think it is our greatest asset. And here it is - in Wayne and Martin - writ large.

And finally, I will end this post on Dean Martin - one of my favorite entertainers of all time - with some words from my brother Brendan. Brendan has a way of capturing what it is, what it really is, about a performer ... the essence - not just in who the performer is - but the response the performer engenders in an audience - and I love his words here.

I remember seeing the Dean Martin roasts and being scared, like a drunk friend of a drunk uncle had showed up unannounced at a dinner party and started shoe-horning everyone into singing along to perverted folk songs. I didn't know what he was famous for and those roasts seemed to hint that he didn't really know why either.

Then, years later as a grownup, I heard "Ain't That A Kick In the Head" in some movie, or in a bar. That's really all you need to do...just listen to that song a few times in a row. It all seems like a joke. Then you start to hear how well he sings the song. Then you realize that someone could have completely fouled the song up. It isn't a very good song, actually. Think about all the classic standards. Everybody does 'em. But is there another famous version of that song? If there is, I haven't heard it.

How does he turn a mediocre song around? He doesn't sound all that invested in the heartbreak aspect of it, there isn't irony dripping all over the place. I still can't quite place what makes the song work so well. But I'm going to try:

His presence and personality are so evident that you don't even need the song. He has sung the song out of existence. All you want to do is hear him make a rumble in his throat and roll his eyes about how much trouble a broad can be. You also somehow realize that no broad ever caused him too much trouble. He causes them trouble. And they love it.

It is almost a taunt. What could be a stupid jokey brushoff of heartache turns into a come-on. It is a magic trick.

Another thing that strikes me about Dean Martin is that you get the sense that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a truck driver, a grocer, a whatever. Most of the other stars of that era seem to have been transformed in some way by fame and what came along with it. This guy could have strolled around the streets of Rome with his jacket over his shoulder and 10 bucks in his pocket and it would make no difference to him.

The most underrated of all time.

EXCERPT FROM Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches

The Desert Inn was still several months away from opening when Dean and Jerry arrived in September 1949. The Flamingo was still the jewel of that stretch of Highway 91 that came to be called the Strip. The Rex Cigar Store, the Jungle Inn, the 500 Club, the Riviera - the great and gaudy neon cathedral of the Flamingo was all these joints exalted. Here, married by God and by state, anointed in the blood of Bugsy Siegel, Unterwelt and American dream lay down together in greed.

Martin and Lewis by now were among the beloved of that dream, embracing and embraced by the spirit of a post-heroic, post-literate, cathode-culture America. The Flamingo was the pleasure dome of the new prefab promised land: a land of chrome, not gold; of Armstrong linoleum, not Carrara marble; of heptalk, not epos of prophecy.

Martin and Lewis were the jesters of that land. Time magazine, then as always the cutting edge of lumpen-American mediocrity, the vox populi of the modern world, celebrated the dazzling appeal of their hilarity. The heart of their audience, the nightclub clientele whose reduction to a quivering mass of thunderous yockers Variety attested again and again, was sophisticated, white-collared, and well-heeled. The sophisticated, white-collared, and well-heeled New York Times itself, in an article published while Martin and Lewis were in Las Vegas, hailed their "refreshing brand of comic hysteria," their "wild and uninhibited imagination".

And yet, these few years later, the nature of that appeal is as alien and as difficult to translate as the language, syntax, and meter of Catallus. There are no films or tapes of their nightclub act. Only secondary fragments have survived to be judged: glimpses of routines reworked for pictures, such as the "Donkey Serenade" scene in My Friend Irma, and for pale renderings on radio; a few rare kinescopes of television broadcasts, none of them predating 1952. Those fragments convey almost nothing of the dazzling appeal of that hilarity proclaimed in contemporary accounts. And yet the howling laughter present in many of those fragments, in the radio shows and television performances, all done before live spectators, is unanswerable. Those spectators, who had lined up for free shows at network studios, were not the same urbane nightclub-goers who howled at the Copacabana or Chez Paree or the Flamingo. Their sense of yockery was perhaps homelier; but, on the other hand, it was less primed by booze. Jerry was right: Martin and Lewis appealed to everyone. But why?

"Let us not be deceived," the New York Times had declared in April 1947, while Dean and Jerry had been playing at the Loew's Capitol; "we are today in the midst of a cold war." Now, in September 1949, while they were in Las Vegas, President Truman, the first president to have a televised inauguration, revealed that the Soviet Union had set off an atomic-bomb explosion. A week later, on October 1, Chairman Mao Tse-tung would formally proclaim the Communist People's Republic of China. In January, Truman would order the development of the hydrogen bomb. Six months later, United States ground troops would invade South Korea. "Let us not be deceived" -- but America wanted nothing more than to be deceived. Martin and Lewis gave them that: not laughter in the dark, but a denial of darkness itself, a regression, a transporting to the preternatural bliss of infantile senselessness. It was a catharsis, a celebration of ignorance, absurdity, and stupidity, as meaningless, as primitive-seeming, and as droll today as the fallout shelters and beatnik posings which offered opposing sanctuary in those days so close in time but so distant in consciousness.

Those days were the beginning of the end of timelessness. Homer's Odyssey spoke throughout the ages; Kerouac's American odyssey, On the Road, would have a shelf life, and would prove after a handful of years more outdated and stale than Homer after thousands. But like the detergent on the shelf in that other supermarket aisle, it was for the moment new and improved; and that is what mattered. And that is why the dead-serious pretensions of Kerouac today seem so droll while the comedy of that same necrophiliac era seems so unfunny.

Dean, of course, had no use for any of this shit. He did not know the new and improved from the old and well-worn. Homer, Sorelli the Mystic: it was all the same shit to him. The Trojan War, World War II, the Cold War, what the fuck did he care? His hernia was bigger than history itself. He cared as much about Korea as Korea cared about his fucking hernia. He walked through his own world. And that world was as much a part of what commanded those audiences as the catharsis of the absurd slapstick; and it would continue to command, long after that catharsis, like a forgotten mystery rite, had lost all meaning and power. His uncaring air of romance reflected the flash and breezy sweet seductions of a world in which everything came down to broads, booze, and money, with plenty of linguine on the side. There was a beckoning to join him in the Lethe of the old ways' woods that appealed to the lover, the menefreghista, the rotten cocksucker, the sweet-hearted dreamer in everyone.

Mickey Cohen, a brutal killer who "got kind of friendly with him," said that "Dean would've been in the rackets if he didn't have the beautiful voice that he has. He probably would've ended up a gambling boss somewhere. I'd say Dean had the perfect makeup to be a racket guy, although he is a little too lackadaisical, if you know what I mean."

Love was Dean's racket. The traits he shared with the Fischettis and the Anastasias - that lontananza, that dark self-serving moralita - were never far beneath the surface of whatever sweet spell he meant to cast. Whatever talent he had, whatever he worked at, whatever was God-given and whatever manufactured, that much, that darkness beneath the spell, was immanent and intractable and ever-there.

Frank Sinatra, who had sung at the Nacional during the Havana yuletide gathering of 1946, was a malavita groupy, a scrawny mama's boy who liked to pretend he was a tough guy. He cultivated the company of, and catered to, men such as the Fischettis. But it was Dean, so aloof and yet seemingly so kindred, to whom those men themselves were drawn.

"They loved him," Jerry said. "But they knew that he wasn't the one to talk to on a business basis. He had his way of getting that clear to them. I would say he was the most brilliant diplomat I've ever known. I used to hear things like 'Talk to the Jew,' 'Talk to the kid,' 'Talk to the little one.' "

The Books: "My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Wonderful book! It might be my favorite of Shirley MacLaine's (although granted I have not read her latest). It's a book of anecdotes and character studies - all the people she worked with and who made an impression on her in her many years in Hollywood. The portrait she paints of Peter Sellers is something that will stay with me always. What an odd complex depressive yet beautiful man. And Anthony Hopkins. Fascinating. Difficult. Emotional. She spends an entire chapter on Frank Sinatra, there's an entire chapter on the entire shoot of Terms of Endearment (a very very difficult shoot) - and she is just in her best form here, throughout. She's not a "surface" kind of person, obviously, and the anecdotes she chooses to share really illuminate the person in question (at least through her eyes - it's her version of, say, Richard Harris, or Frank Sinatra). She does not pull her punches. She's honest. She's telling it like she sees it. She does not spare Debra Winger, and yet somehow it doesn't come off as bitchy. It comes off more as baffled. Like: how on earth am I supposed to deal with this person? But when someone, even someone like Winger, does something extraordinary - or is able to project their particular genius onscreen - MacLaine is more than willing to give the props. MacLaine comes off as the real deal: an insightful intuitive person, someone who knows who she is, but is also willing to grow and learn and be surprised.

She tells one of my favorite stories about Jack Nicholson, an actor I truly love. Not only do I just love his acting - I just flat out love his whole career, his attitude, his vibe, his energy - whatever you want to call it. When he shows up at the Oscars, wearing sunglasses, I am thrilled. He brings an aspect of anarchy to everything he does ... and yet there's an integrity there, a seriousness about the work ... He has such a fine reputation. He has been in the business his whole life, practically, and so one of the things he does on every set is to befriend EVERYONE. The lady who makes the sandwiches, the grip, the gaffer, his drivers, the makeup woman, the coffee guy, the lowly PAs ... they all become his best friends. He knows everyone by name. It's not a game with him, he's not "playing" them. It's that ... the movie set is his home - probably more so than any real home he actually has. And so whereever he is - he creates a family. He is notorious for this. The stories about him abound. Gifts he gave to the random woman who set up the craft table, because they shared a joke one morning ... whatever ... He's kind. He's generous. He knows a movie is a collaboration - and although he is usually the biggest star in whatever picture he is in - he knows he's not in it alone. So Jack Nicholson probably has more friends than anyone on earth, if you think about it. He knows everyone. He is about personal relationships. I love that about him and I think it shows in his work. But anyway, back to MacLaine's story about Nicholson - which is my favorite. Because of the vague air of anarchy that floats around him, I think it sometimes can be overlooked what a professional he is, and how seriously he takes the work. Yeah, it should be fun, but if you're goofing off or not focusing when you should ... out comes the roaring tiger. The shoot of Terms was pretty chaotic- and the responsibility for that lies with the director, as always. He is the one who sets the tone, who protects the actors from the chaos behind the scenes, who keeps things moving forward, under control. At the time of this anecdote, Jim Brooks had totally lost control of his own movie. Here's the story from the Terms shoot:

When Jack Nicholson arrived back to shoot his scene, he sensed there was trouble. Jack is a master of the intuitive. His nose started to twitch. He was like an animal perceiving a negative vibration - a monstrous dynamic in our midst.

When you've been around our business as long a Jack had, you grasp the dynamic on the set immediately.

I could see he didn't like it. The crew was operating in a disjointed, fragmented way ... taking too long ... arguing over inane things. Jim was slightly wild-eyed, but looking for a way to use the chaos. The dynamic was insinuating itself, working its destruction.

We were doing the kitchen scene, where Jack had pages of dialogue describing what it was like, as an astronaut, to walk on the moon. Then he noticed the camera crew was not together. The prop guy was late with the food we were supposed to eat in the scene and no one was in charge. The dynamic permeated the set as though it had a personality and an intention. It became an invisible being who was about to jeopardize Jack. Jack was up for practical jokes regardless of how bizarre, but not for the dynamic of unprofessionalism. I sat across from him, watching the buildup of an explosion. Suddenly his eyes narrowed as he did a quick sweep-of-a-look around the set. He was ready to work and they weren't.

"Hey," he yelled. "Motherfucker - hey!"

Suddenly he slammed his fists onto the top of the kitchen table with a violence that literally shook the set. The crew froze; no one moved. Everyone had been put on notice and they knew it. Then Jack collected himself. He smiled that devil smile. I could feel the dynamic shrink away.

Jack's is not a petty temperament. When he is threatened or angry, he can be truly impressive. His repressed violence is nothing to trifle with, certainly not to be manipulated. And he's not in the same class with those who tinker with danger, as Jim does. Jack is real danger - class-A danger - smiling danger. The kind that renders a crew paralytic. The kind that makes your blood run cold because he's willing to pay the price. Which is what happened that morning. And from that flashing moment on, the set was reborn into a professional unit inspired to make a movie the way it should be made.

I believe it.

The book is full of gems like that.

Her relationship with "The Rat Pack" (they called her "the Mascot") makes up a huge part of the book - and it's really fun reading, but also not exactly what you would think. The dynamic of that group - Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin ... was not always pleasant, there was some serious misogyny going on, they protected MacLaine and accepted her, but she also knew when it was "boy time" and she wasn't wanted - but I was mostly interested in the dynamic between Sinatra and Martin. Wow. An entire book could be written about what was going on there between those two men. Martin walked away, was able to walk away ... Sinatra never was. He had to hold on. That was all he was about. So perhaps there was something elusive in Martin - that aspect of him that could walk away, of his own free will, from performing - that drove Sinatra up a wall. I don't know. Sinatra could be a son-of-a-bitch (that's no surprise) but he could also be the most generous man in the world. When MacLaine came to Hollywood to do Some Came Running - originally in the script, it was Sinatra's character who died in the end. But Sinatra, with that strange intuition he had at times, said in some script meeting - "No. Let the kid die." (He always called MacLaine "the kid"). "No. Let the kid die. If you let her die, she'll get the nomination." And that is exactly what happened. Pretty amazing, right? Somehow he sensed that it would be better for the story if "the kid" died (he was right) - and he also sensed that if MacLaine was the one to die, she'd get nominated (he was right). Anyway, I really loved all the Rat Pack information ... as upsetting as some of it was.

MacLaine was one of those rare women who, first of all, was not seen in a sexual way by these guys - but she also wasn't in any way, shape, or form, a prude. She was not a big drinker, and she always had great discipline about how much sleep she got a night, and things like that ... but she also loved to have a good time. They taught her how to play poker. She would clean up after them (they were all pigs). They would tease her. They would be big brother-ly towards her. They didn't just tolerate her, they loved her. She was friends with all of them forever. It was Dean Martin she really loved (as a matter of fact, she convinced herself for about one month - that he was the love of her life. She KNEW it. He was IT. Of course he wasn't - and Martin knew that, too - but that is just indicative of how strong her feelings were for him. She looked at him and, just like Sinatra, felt that there was only so far she could "get in there" and it captivated her.) They were dear friends - but not intimate friends. Martin wasn't really intimate with people in that way. But I've put one of my favorite photos EVER below the jump ... which kind of captures the MacLaine - Martin friendship ... and it makes me smile every time I see it.

In 1955, MacLaine appeared in Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin - the second-to-last of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movies. MacLaine had grown up loving Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis so this was a thrill for her - but what was not so thrilling was realizing that the team was pretty much breaking up, during the course of the movie. It broke her heart.

The excerpt I chose today has to do with MacLaine's fascinating impressions of Dean Martin. As anyone who's read me for a while knows, I have a low-level obsession with Dean Martin (nothing approaching the Cary Grant, Stalin or Dean Stockwell level - but obsession nonetheless) ... and MacLaine's words here are riveting to me. Because nobody really knew Dean Martin (but we'll get to him in a bit - when we arrive at Nick Tosches' startlingly brilliant book about Martin) ... and so MacLaine doesn't try to explain him, or psychoanalyze him - not really. She just describes what she saw, in the man that she knew.

And she tells one of my favorite stories about Martin (him calling the cops ... look for it.)

Well done. I love this book.

EXCERPT FROM My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Dino Crocetti - Dean Martin - had been born into an environment where the Mob resided as neighborhood characters. In Steubenville, Ohio, he discovered the rackets early and he loved to bet on anything that moved. After school he'd make the rounds of pool rooms, cigar stores, and gambling dens. His offhand stories of the old days captivated me.

I asked him about Vegas and Bugsy Siegel, who dared to build the Flamingo Hotel and make it the first grand establishment for gambling, before anyone else was there.

Dean smiled. "Guess who was in the pit opening night, dealing blackjack?" he asked.

"Who?" I asked.

"Me!"

He told me about some of the Mob characters, his stories making it clear they were "not gentlemen", but he was protective of my knowing too much about such people.

Over the years I saw that Dean was not impressed with the Mob. He grew up with them, and therefore, he shared many of their Old Country traits - privacy of thought and feeling that no one dared to violate, an emotional detachment from the world and everything in it, an unspoken belief in a Catholic God who would forgive even the most heinous crime through confession. But, in his soul, Dean didn't want to run with the Mob. I always felt he didn't even like them. He didn't come when they called. Instead, he played gin, or drank, or did card tricks, or tried out new material for his act on whoever else happened to be around.

For them and everyone else, Dean was a menefreghista, one who simply did not give a fuck.

I did not know all this when I first met Dean. My initial impression was of a man who basically wanted to be left alone. He was nice to everyone; he just didn't want "nice" to go on too long. Often there would be parties at his home on Mountain Drive, where he and Jeanne lived with their seven children. Three of the kids were Jeanne's and four were Betty's - Dean's first wife. Dean didn't particularly want to be involved in the upbringing of the children. He told me he felt inadequate, and his own emotional blocks prevented communication anyway. Whenever Jeanne asked him to have a stern talk with one of the children, Dean would take the child into his den and say, "I have nothing to say, but please tell your mother I bawled you out, okay?" The child would comply and sometime later would get a new car.

Dean insisted on being home every night for dinner with his children. It was a ritual that gave him the Old Country feeling that he was the head of the household and connected to his children's future.

Much of his humor on the set revolved around things that happened in what he called the "big hotel". He said he'd try to count them all, but he never learned to count that high. He said he had to eat standing up because he had "screwed himself out of a seat" at the table. His family humor gave the impression that his was an emotionally volatile, rough and tumble, interconnected Italian family. It might have been that, but Dean wasn't a part of it.

Even when Jeanne had dinner parties attended by the most interesting people in town, Dean would usually just go to his room and watch television. More than once he retired to his den and called the cops, saying there was a party at his house and it was getting too noisy. Once I lost my pearls at one of their dinner parties. I wandered around looking for them and ended up in Dean's den. He was watching television while his guests were having dinner. He said I could sit down. I did and he told me he felt shy about not being educated and ashamed of his limited vocabulary and his lack of political and social knowledge. "I can't understand what the hell they're talking about down there," he said. "So I don't want them to know I feel dumb." He then launched into some new material for his club act, which was so funny I laughed until I felt like I had a hernia! Dean was terrified of the intimacy required to carry on a conversation, so he inevitably segued into comedy routines.

That was what I found the most intriguing aspect of Dean. When a man fears intimacy, I'm interested. I try to open him up. It didn't happen when we worked on Artists and Models; that came later.

On that first film with Dean I was awestruck at his and Jerry's antics. Even though there was always tension underneath, they seemed to share a compulsive need for the experience of creating and playing to an audience. Perhaps the tension fed that need, or maybe they were simply performers to the core and their world inevitably became a stage.

They careened around the Paramount lot on their motorized golf carts, clanging bells and tooting horns, stopping for a beautiful young starlet to cross the street as they drew a crowd by teasing her into red-faced embarrassment.

If they had an interview with a newspaper reporter, they might cut the tie of a man and perhaps set it on fire, or curl up like a baby in the lap of a woman reporter and suck her thumb. Nothing was out of bounds. They'd flop into cars driven by strangers and scream bloody murder that they were being kidnapped. Dean would light a cigarette with his solid gold lighter, blow out the flame, and toss the gold lighter from the window as though it was a used match. Someone, I noticed, always retrieved it for him.

There were custard pies thrown in the face, butter pats splattered on ceilings, golf clubs and balls slung around like children's toys. There was Jewish deli in Jerry's dressing room, and antipasto in Dean's; visiting musicians with sheet music of new song ideas, comedy writers who realized that the Martin and Lewis heyday was producing moments of genius that should be recorded, and the inevitable producers, directors, and agents who attended to the needs of the talented team Americans would never see the likes of again. The agents, Herman Citron and Mort Viner, were also my agents at MCA, so in many ways I felt part of a new family ... a family that defied every value I had been brought up with. I had been schooled in a WASP middle-class environment, to say nothing of having been brought up to respect authority in the world of ballet. It was beyond my comprehension that Dean and Jerry could be so freewheeling as to play practical jokes on one of the studio heads and get away with it. Y. Frank Freeman was a southern gentleman with white hair and a hospitable manner. When Dean and Jerry spontaneously made him the brunt of their humor in the commissary during lunch hour, I watched with openmouthed astonishment.

Because he was the president of Paramount, he often entertained big, established stars at lunch meetings - Gloria Swanson, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando among them. I think he was proud to be seen escorting the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Anna Magnani through the tables to the executive dining room.

Whenever Dean and Jerry spotted such an event, the potential for deprecating humor was too much for them to pass up.

Their favorite rap was to stop Freeman and "visiting stars" in the midst of the big room and pose as inmates in a prison. "We don't need to eat this slop," they'd yell at Y. Frank while smearing butter all over his suit. (Butter was a big prop for their comedy). They'd then pick up their food with their hands (lamb chops, tuna salad - it didn't matter), squeeze it through their fingers and throw it around the table. Freeman would hover in gentlemanly shock, waiting for their next move. Marlene or Magnani would take a discreet step backward, careful not to provoke inclusion, leaving Y. Frank directly in the line of fire. That's when Dean and Jerry would really let him have it. One routine was their favorite.

"Okay," they'd say. "So you've called us all here. Tell the people why."

Freeman's mouth was painted open by now, causing speechlessness. The diners were just as nonplussed. They watched in shock.

"Why?" Dean and Jerry would yell.

"Because," said Dean and Jerry in unison, "because you all are fired!"

Everybody would laugh, including Y. Frank, because they were secretly acknowledging his power.

Jerry would then stuff french fries up his nose or throw spinach in Dean's face and tell him he should have washed that morning. Dean would shove cold cuts into his mouth and wag them like a huge flopping tongue. Marlene or Magnani would no doubt long for the Old Country as they smiled in abject terror, wondering when and how they'd be included in the insanity.

Then Dean would take Freeman by the arm and, like a Dutch uncle, lead him out of the commissary saying, "We simply don't like your attitude in here - you are fired." Jerry would bring up the rear and both would kick Freeman out the door. "Wash up, collect your pay - and we'll take care of the girls," they'd yell.

Marlene and Magnani had been around show business, but never like this.

By now the commissary would be in bedlam at the preposterousness of it all. There were two respected, dignified international icons stranded in the middle of the dining room while the boss of the studio had been kicked out by brash American upstarts. How would this routine end?

"One more thing," Dean would yell out at Freeman. "This studio is filthy. There're cigarette butts all over the place." (He'd light a cigarette with his gold lighter, take a puff, throw the cigarette down, crunch it out, and again throw the lighter away.) "Everywhere I look, cigarette butts!" Jerry came from behind like a spastic monkey. "And have our cars washed immediately," he'd screech. "In fact, have all our cars washed."

The commissary would applaud. Dean and Jerry knew this was their exit. They'd gallantly make their way back to the screen goddesses, open their arms, and lead the by now amused beauties to the executive dining room.

I would sit tongue-tied at the sheer audacity of it all. I'd never seen people behave like that. In my world there had been an inferred censor. A silent alarm that instantly sounded caution. I couldn't do what I had just seen Dean and Jerry do, not in a million years. The irreverence - the disrespect - the outrageous disregard for form and social appropriateness ... Where had I been all my life? This stuff was great! It got laughs, it loosened people up, they didn't take their precarious jobs so seriously - how could they? I'd not met that many Italians and Jews. The ethnic ethos of their comedy was what made Y. Frank squirm. He was from my part of the world. Him I understand. But him was no fun.

Later Freeman would offer Dean and Jerry money just to be quiet for one lunch hour. They'd turn him down, and Freeman would willingly offer himself up on the altar of their zaniness yet another time.

I guess that was it in a nutshell. When you went that far out on a limb, you were successful. If you pulled your punches, you sucked dirt.

Dean and Jerry were my primary education in spontaneous, Katzenjammer antics to let off steam, avoid ulcers, and touch the muse of comic insanity bubbling in each of us.

I observed the havoc Dean caused, however, by sometimes being funnier than his partner. Dean would come to work throwing away comedy lines that you could barely hear. When someone would say, "Huh?" he'd repeat it. A laugh would come, which he would top, then another laugh, then he'd top that until he was on a roll. Soon the entire set was engulfed in the more sophisticated, quirky, literal humor of Dean's words, which revealed the peculiar slant he had on any given situation. His humor was not as physical as Jerry's, although it could be - especially with his hands. Dean's hands were the size of ham hocks, with fingers that curled inward. He had broken several fingers boxing and they were strong from working in the steel mills. His hands encompassed so much space that it was easy for him to palm cards when he was a blackjack dealer. He could deal from the middle, the bottom, or wherever, and never be detected. He entertained me between set-ups with sleight-of-hand card tricks. In between the tricks he'd lob in his funny lines as though he was testing new material. People would crowd closer so as not to miss any of his subtleties.

The Books: "My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Wonderful book! It might be my favorite of Shirley MacLaine's (although granted I have not read her latest). It's a book of anecdotes and character studies - all the people she worked with and who made an impression on her in her many years in Hollywood. The portrait she paints of Peter Sellers is something that will stay with me always. What an odd complex depressive yet beautiful man. And Anthony Hopkins. Fascinating. Difficult. Emotional. She spends an entire chapter on Frank Sinatra, there's an entire chapter on the entire shoot of Terms of Endearment (a very very difficult shoot) - and she is just in her best form here, throughout. She's not a "surface" kind of person, obviously, and the anecdotes she chooses to share really illuminate the person in question (at least through her eyes - it's her version of, say, Richard Harris, or Frank Sinatra). She does not pull her punches. She's honest. She's telling it like she sees it. She does not spare Debra Winger, and yet somehow it doesn't come off as bitchy. It comes off more as baffled. Like: how on earth am I supposed to deal with this person? But when someone, even someone like Winger, does something extraordinary - or is able to project their particular genius onscreen - MacLaine is more than willing to give the props. MacLaine comes off as the real deal: an insightful intuitive person, someone who knows who she is, but is also willing to grow and learn and be surprised.

She tells one of my favorite stories about Jack Nicholson, an actor I truly love. Not only do I just love his acting - I just flat out love his whole career, his attitude, his vibe, his energy - whatever you want to call it. When he shows up at the Oscars, wearing sunglasses, I am thrilled. He brings an aspect of anarchy to everything he does ... and yet there's an integrity there, a seriousness about the work ... He has such a fine reputation. He has been in the business his whole life, practically, and so one of the things he does on every set is to befriend EVERYONE. The lady who makes the sandwiches, the grip, the gaffer, his drivers, the makeup woman, the coffee guy, the lowly PAs ... they all become his best friends. He knows everyone by name. It's not a game with him, he's not "playing" them. It's that ... the movie set is his home - probably more so than any real home he actually has. And so whereever he is - he creates a family. He is notorious for this. The stories about him abound. Gifts he gave to the random woman who set up the craft table, because they shared a joke one morning ... whatever ... He's kind. He's generous. He knows a movie is a collaboration - and although he is usually the biggest star in whatever picture he is in - he knows he's not in it alone. So Jack Nicholson probably has more friends than anyone on earth, if you think about it. He knows everyone. He is about personal relationships. I love that about him and I think it shows in his work. But anyway, back to MacLaine's story about Nicholson - which is my favorite. Because of the vague air of anarchy that floats around him, I think it sometimes can be overlooked what a professional he is, and how seriously he takes the work. Yeah, it should be fun, but if you're goofing off or not focusing when you should ... out comes the roaring tiger. The shoot of Terms was pretty chaotic- and the responsibility for that lies with the director, as always. He is the one who sets the tone, who protects the actors from the chaos behind the scenes, who keeps things moving forward, under control. At the time of this anecdote, Jim Brooks had totally lost control of his own movie. Here's the story from the Terms shoot:

When Jack Nicholson arrived back to shoot his scene, he sensed there was trouble. Jack is a master of the intuitive. His nose started to twitch. He was like an animal perceiving a negative vibration - a monstrous dynamic in our midst.

When you've been around our business as long a Jack had, you grasp the dynamic on the set immediately.

I could see he didn't like it. The crew was operating in a disjointed, fragmented way ... taking too long ... arguing over inane things. Jim was slightly wild-eyed, but looking for a way to use the chaos. The dynamic was insinuating itself, working its destruction.

We were doing the kitchen scene, where Jack had pages of dialogue describing what it was like, as an astronaut, to walk on the moon. Then he noticed the camera crew was not together. The prop guy was late with the food we were supposed to eat in the scene and no one was in charge. The dynamic permeated the set as though it had a personality and an intention. It became an invisible being who was about to jeopardize Jack. Jack was up for practical jokes regardless of how bizarre, but not for the dynamic of unprofessionalism. I sat across from him, watching the buildup of an explosion. Suddenly his eyes narrowed as he did a quick sweep-of-a-look around the set. He was ready to work and they weren't.

"Hey," he yelled. "Motherfucker - hey!"

Suddenly he slammed his fists onto the top of the kitchen table with a violence that literally shook the set. The crew froze; no one moved. Everyone had been put on notice and they knew it. Then Jack collected himself. He smiled that devil smile. I could feel the dynamic shrink away.

Jack's is not a petty temperament. When he is threatened or angry, he can be truly impressive. His repressed violence is nothing to trifle with, certainly not to be manipulated. And he's not in the same class with those who tinker with danger, as Jim does. Jack is real danger - class-A danger - smiling danger. The kind that renders a crew paralytic. The kind that makes your blood run cold because he's willing to pay the price. Which is what happened that morning. And from that flashing moment on, the set was reborn into a professional unit inspired to make a movie the way it should be made.

I believe it.

The book is full of gems like that.

Her relationship with "The Rat Pack" (they called her "the Mascot") makes up a huge part of the book - and it's really fun reading, but also not exactly what you would think. The dynamic of that group - Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin ... was not always pleasant, there was some serious misogyny going on, they protected MacLaine and accepted her, but she also knew when it was "boy time" and she wasn't wanted - but I was mostly interested in the dynamic between Sinatra and Martin. Wow. An entire book could be written about what was going on there between those two men. Martin walked away, was able to walk away ... Sinatra never was. He had to hold on. That was all he was about. So perhaps there was something elusive in Martin - that aspect of him that could walk away, of his own free will, from performing - that drove Sinatra up a wall. I don't know. Sinatra could be a son-of-a-bitch (that's no surprise) but he could also be the most generous man in the world. When MacLaine came to Hollywood to do Some Came Running - originally in the script, it was Sinatra's character who died in the end. But Sinatra, with that strange intuition he had at times, said in some script meeting - "No. Let the kid die." (He always called MacLaine "the kid"). "No. Let the kid die. If you let her die, she'll get the nomination." And that is exactly what happened. Pretty amazing, right? Somehow he sensed that it would be better for the story if "the kid" died (he was right) - and he also sensed that if MacLaine was the one to die, she'd get nominated (he was right). Anyway, I really loved all the Rat Pack information ... as upsetting as some of it was.

MacLaine was one of those rare women who, first of all, was not seen in a sexual way by these guys - but she also wasn't in any way, shape, or form, a prude. She was not a big drinker, and she always had great discipline about how much sleep she got a night, and things like that ... but she also loved to have a good time. They taught her how to play poker. She would clean up after them (they were all pigs). They would tease her. They would be big brother-ly towards her. They didn't just tolerate her, they loved her. She was friends with all of them forever. It was Dean Martin she really loved (as a matter of fact, she convinced herself for about one month - that he was the love of her life. She KNEW it. He was IT. Of course he wasn't - and Martin knew that, too - but that is just indicative of how strong her feelings were for him. She looked at him and, just like Sinatra, felt that there was only so far she could "get in there" and it captivated her.) They were dear friends - but not intimate friends. Martin wasn't really intimate with people in that way. But I've put one of my favorite photos EVER below the jump ... which kind of captures the MacLaine - Martin friendship ... and it makes me smile every time I see it.

In 1955, MacLaine appeared in Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin - the second-to-last of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movies. MacLaine had grown up loving Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis so this was a thrill for her - but what was not so thrilling was realizing that the team was pretty much breaking up, during the course of the movie. It broke her heart.

The excerpt I chose today has to do with MacLaine's fascinating impressions of Dean Martin. As anyone who's read me for a while knows, I have a low-level obsession with Dean Martin (nothing approaching the Cary Grant, Stalin or Dean Stockwell level - but obsession nonetheless) ... and MacLaine's words here are riveting to me. Because nobody really knew Dean Martin (but we'll get to him in a bit - when we arrive at Nick Tosches' startlingly brilliant book about Martin) ... and so MacLaine doesn't try to explain him, or psychoanalyze him - not really. She just describes what she saw, in the man that she knew.

And she tells one of my favorite stories about Martin (him calling the cops ... look for it.)

Well done. I love this book.

EXCERPT FROM My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Dino Crocetti - Dean Martin - had been born into an environment where the Mob resided as neighborhood characters. In Steubenville, Ohio, he discovered the rackets early and he loved to bet on anything that moved. After school he'd make the rounds of pool rooms, cigar stores, and gambling dens. His offhand stories of the old days captivated me.

I asked him about Vegas and Bugsy Siegel, who dared to build the Flamingo Hotel and make it the first grand establishment for gambling, before anyone else was there.

Dean smiled. "Guess who was in the pit opening night, dealing blackjack?" he asked.

"Who?" I asked.

"Me!"

He told me about some of the Mob characters, his stories making it clear they were "not gentlemen", but he was protective of my knowing too much about such people.

Over the years I saw that Dean was not impressed with the Mob. He grew up with them, and therefore, he shared many of their Old Country traits - privacy of thought and feeling that no one dared to violate, an emotional detachment from the world and everything in it, an unspoken belief in a Catholic God who would forgive even the most heinous crime through confession. But, in his soul, Dean didn't want to run with the Mob. I always felt he didn't even like them. He didn't come when they called. Instead, he played gin, or drank, or did card tricks, or tried out new material for his act on whoever else happened to be around.

For them and everyone else, Dean was a menefreghista, one who simply did not give a fuck.

I did not know all this when I first met Dean. My initial impression was of a man who basically wanted to be left alone. He was nice to everyone; he just didn't want "nice" to go on too long. Often there would be parties at his home on Mountain Drive, where he and Jeanne lived with their seven children. Three of the kids were Jeanne's and four were Betty's - Dean's first wife. Dean didn't particularly want to be involved in the upbringing of the children. He told me he felt inadequate, and his own emotional blocks prevented communication anyway. Whenever Jeanne asked him to have a stern talk with one of the children, Dean would take the child into his den and say, "I have nothing to say, but please tell your mother I bawled you out, okay?" The child would comply and sometime later would get a new car.

Dean insisted on being home every night for dinner with his children. It was a ritual that gave him the Old Country feeling that he was the head of the household and connected to his children's future.

Much of his humor on the set revolved around things that happened in what he called the "big hotel". He said he'd try to count them all, but he never learned to count that high. He said he had to eat standing up because he had "screwed himself out of a seat" at the table. His family humor gave the impression that his was an emotionally volatile, rough and tumble, interconnected Italian family. It might have been that, but Dean wasn't a part of it.

Even when Jeanne had dinner parties attended by the most interesting people in town, Dean would usually just go to his room and watch television. More than once he retired to his den and called the cops, saying there was a party at his house and it was getting too noisy. Once I lost my pearls at one of their dinner parties. I wandered around looking for them and ended up in Dean's den. He was watching television while his guests were having dinner. He said I could sit down. I did and he told me he felt shy about not being educated and ashamed of his limited vocabulary and his lack of political and social knowledge. "I can't understand what the hell they're talking about down there," he said. "So I don't want them to know I feel dumb." He then launched into some new material for his club act, which was so funny I laughed until I felt like I had a hernia! Dean was terrified of the intimacy required to carry on a conversation, so he inevitably segued into comedy routines.

That was what I found the most intriguing aspect of Dean. When a man fears intimacy, I'm interested. I try to open him up. It didn't happen when we worked on Artists and Models; that came later.

On that first film with Dean I was awestruck at his and Jerry's antics. Even though there was always tension underneath, they seemed to share a compulsive need for the experience of creating and playing to an audience. Perhaps the tension fed that need, or maybe they were simply performers to the core and their world inevitably became a stage.

They careened around the Paramount lot on their motorized golf carts, clanging bells and tooting horns, stopping for a beautiful young starlet to cross the street as they drew a crowd by teasing her into red-faced embarrassment.

If they had an interview with a newspaper reporter, they might cut the tie of a man and perhaps set it on fire, or curl up like a baby in the lap of a woman reporter and suck her thumb. Nothing was out of bounds. They'd flop into cars driven by strangers and scream bloody murder that they were being kidnapped. Dean would light a cigarette with his solid gold lighter, blow out the flame, and toss the gold lighter from the window as though it was a used match. Someone, I noticed, always retrieved it for him.

There were custard pies thrown in the face, butter pats splattered on ceilings, golf clubs and balls slung around like children's toys. There was Jewish deli in Jerry's dressing room, and antipasto in Dean's; visiting musicians with sheet music of new song ideas, comedy writers who realized that the Martin and Lewis heyday was producing moments of genius that should be recorded, and the inevitable producers, directors, and agents who attended to the needs of the talented team Americans would never see the likes of again. The agents, Herman Citron and Mort Viner, were also my agents at MCA, so in many ways I felt part of a new family ... a family that defied every value I had been brought up with. I had been schooled in a WASP middle-class environment, to say nothing of having been brought up to respect authority in the world of ballet. It was beyond my comprehension that Dean and Jerry could be so freewheeling as to play practical jokes on one of the studio heads and get away with it. Y. Frank Freeman was a southern gentleman with white hair and a hospitable manner. When Dean and Jerry spontaneously made him the brunt of their humor in the commissary during lunch hour, I watched with openmouthed astonishment.

Because he was the president of Paramount, he often entertained big, established stars at lunch meetings - Gloria Swanson, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando among them. I think he was proud to be seen escorting the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Anna Magnani through the tables to the executive dining room.

Whenever Dean and Jerry spotted such an event, the potential for deprecating humor was too much for them to pass up.

Their favorite rap was to stop Freeman and "visiting stars" in the midst of the big room and pose as inmates in a prison. "We don't need to eat this slop," they'd yell at Y. Frank while smearing butter all over his suit. (Butter was a big prop for their comedy). They'd then pick up their food with their hands (lamb chops, tuna salad - it didn't matter), squeeze it through their fingers and throw it around the table. Freeman would hover in gentlemanly shock, waiting for their next move. Marlene or Magnani would take a discreet step backward, careful not to provoke inclusion, leaving Y. Frank directly in the line of fire. That's when Dean and Jerry would really let him have it. One routine was their favorite.

"Okay," they'd say. "So you've called us all here. Tell the people why."

Freeman's mouth was painted open by now, causing speechlessness. The diners were just as nonplussed. They watched in shock.

"Why?" Dean and Jerry would yell.

"Because," said Dean and Jerry in unison, "because you all are fired!"

Everybody would laugh, including Y. Frank, because they were secretly acknowledging his power.

Jerry would then stuff french fries up his nose or throw spinach in Dean's face and tell him he should have washed that morning. Dean would shove cold cuts into his mouth and wag them like a huge flopping tongue. Marlene or Magnani would no doubt long for the Old Country as they smiled in abject terror, wondering when and how they'd be included in the insanity.

Then Dean would take Freeman by the arm and, like a Dutch uncle, lead him out of the commissary saying, "We simply don't like your attitude in here - you are fired." Jerry would bring up the rear and both would kick Freeman out the door. "Wash up, collect your pay - and we'll take care of the girls," they'd yell.

Marlene and Magnani had been around show business, but never like this.

By now the commissary would be in bedlam at the preposterousness of it all. There were two respected, dignified international icons stranded in the middle of the dining room while the boss of the studio had been kicked out by brash American upstarts. How would this routine end?

"One more thing," Dean would yell out at Freeman. "This studio is filthy. There're cigarette butts all over the place." (He'd light a cigarette with his gold lighter, take a puff, throw the cigarette down, crunch it out, and again throw the lighter away.) "Everywhere I look, cigarette butts!" Jerry came from behind like a spastic monkey. "And have our cars washed immediately," he'd screech. "In fact, have all our cars washed."

The commissary would applaud. Dean and Jerry knew this was their exit. They'd gallantly make their way back to the screen goddesses, open their arms, and lead the by now amused beauties to the executive dining room.

I would sit tongue-tied at the sheer audacity of it all. I'd never seen people behave like that. In my world there had been an inferred censor. A silent alarm that instantly sounded caution. I couldn't do what I had just seen Dean and Jerry do, not in a million years. The irreverence - the disrespect - the outrageous disregard for form and social appropriateness ... Where had I been all my life? This stuff was great! It got laughs, it loosened people up, they didn't take their precarious jobs so seriously - how could they? I'd not met that many Italians and Jews. The ethnic ethos of their comedy was what made Y. Frank squirm. He was from my part of the world. Him I understand. But him was no fun.

Later Freeman would offer Dean and Jerry money just to be quiet for one lunch hour. They'd turn him down, and Freeman would willingly offer himself up on the altar of their zaniness yet another time.

I guess that was it in a nutshell. When you went that far out on a limb, you were successful. If you pulled your punches, you sucked dirt.

Dean and Jerry were my primary education in spontaneous, Katzenjammer antics to let off steam, avoid ulcers, and touch the muse of comic insanity bubbling in each of us.

I observed the havoc Dean caused, however, by sometimes being funnier than his partner. Dean would come to work throwing away comedy lines that you could barely hear. When someone would say, "Huh?" he'd repeat it. A laugh would come, which he would top, then another laugh, then he'd top that until he was on a roll. Soon the entire set was engulfed in the more sophisticated, quirky, literal humor of Dean's words, which revealed the peculiar slant he had on any given situation. His humor was not as physical as Jerry's, although it could be - especially with his hands. Dean's hands were the size of ham hocks, with fingers that curled inward. He had broken several fingers boxing and they were strong from working in the steel mills. His hands encompassed so much space that it was easy for him to palm cards when he was a blackjack dealer. He could deal from the middle, the bottom, or wherever, and never be detected. He entertained me between set-ups with sleight-of-hand card tricks. In between the tricks he'd lob in his funny lines as though he was testing new material. People would crowd closer so as not to miss any of his subtleties.

The Books: "Dance While You Can" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Dance While You Can, by Shirley MacLaine

Dance While You Can came out in the early 90s. Now it can't be said that MacLaine ever really had a dry period - that's one of the amazing things about her career. She has said that she started to play "character parts" (meaning: NOT leading ladies, NOT romantic leads) early - most women hold on to their leading lady status as long as they can ... then they go into a blackout period of about 10 to 15 years - and emerge, as older women, ready to play character parts. (That is, if the actress is successful in the first place). MacLaine was nothing if not practical. She always was. It's her dance training. She was the kind of person who dreamt as a child of one thing and one thing only: to be a prima ballerina. So she studied, spent every night in dance class - as a kid! - and actually went quite far in developing herself. But in her late teens, she came to the painful realization that she just was not good enough. She would never get out of the corps, and that was not the life she wanted for herself. So she "switched" to acting. This is a decision so hard to make that many people in her position put it off and put it off until it is too late. The business is full of bitter sad people who just didn't live the life they WANTED to live. Not MacLaine. She gutted it out, let the dream of dancing go (although not entirely, of course), and changed track. But her career is full of such moments - and it was a conscious decision, in her 30s, to start playing the "character" parts ... She wasn't afraid to play older than she was, she wasn't afraid to play eccentrics, she would rather WORK than try to hold on to her status as a leading lady. This is a rare thing. You can see the success of it in her career.

She was nominated for an Oscar time and time again. Shirley MacLaine has vanity, just like the rest of us - she keeps her body in shape, she cultivates herself, she always looks fabulous when you see her out in public - but on screen? She didn't care. Like the scene at the end of Terms of Endearment in the hospital, when you can see she hasn't dyed her hair and her dark roots are showing, and she looks like hell. This isn't an affectation, this isn't playing "ugly" - this is dedication to the reality of whatever character she is playing. She knew that longevity resided in character parts. Leading ladies have a shelf life. Character actors are forever.

Dance While You Can is primarily an investigation into family relationships - MacLaine's relationship with her parents, as well as her daughter Sachi ... not always smooth sailing ... but full of lessons learned. And so MacLaine, focusing on Postcards for the entirety of the book, with its entire plot having to do with family, and dealing with parental expectations, and old regrets, and all that family CRAP ... makes sense. MacLaine tries to make amends in the book to her daughter Sachi - who spent much of her childhood in Japan, at an international school, and MacLaine cannot forgive herself for "abandoning" her there. She doesn't "know" her daughter, in many ways.

In 1990, she appeared in Postcards from the Edge with Meryl Streep. She was lifelong friends with Debbie Reynolds and so the chance to 'play her' was really fun for MacLaine ... not to mention the fact that she had never worked with Streep.

And here (in the excerpt below) her practicality comes to the fore again. MacLaine is an odd and interesting mix of humility (a true dancer's mindset) and confidence. When she finally won an Oscar for Terms of Endearment after a million nominations she said in her acceptance speech, "I deserve this." She knows she's a good actress. And the Terms set was a notoriously tempestuous one, and Debra Winger and she did not (to put it mildly) get along. But whatever happened offscreen stayed offscreen - or that particular brand of tension and fear of the other was translated into the sparks-flying too-intense mother-daughter relationship. Whatever alchemy was going on, it doesn't matter. MacLaine had made it through and triumphed. It's one of my favorite MacLaine performances. But my point here is that MacLaine does not have a shrinking ego, and she is not intimidated easily. She's worked with Hitchcock, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder, Anne Bancroft - great great people. She knows she's good. She knows she's fortunate, too, but she knows she's good.

I set it up this way because MacLaine has told the story in the excerpt below before - about how, during her first scene with Meryl Streep in Postcards ... she thought she was doing fine, then they went and watched the dailies - and she realized how much Meryl Streep was acting her off the screen. Her description of that moment is interesting - and there's much to discuss. It sounds as though Meryl Streep is in her own little world, creating her character, not really interacting with MacLaine - just doing her own brilliant thing individually. Is that right? What about collaboration? HOWEVER: if you think about the relationship of mother and daughter in Postcards - and how they talk OVER each other, without ever really hearing ... how each character is so wrapped up in her own ego and her own needs that all she sees in the other is an obstacle ... you can see that (as always) there was a method to Streep's madness. MacLaine and Streep work differently. MacLaine is a good actress of the old school. She doesn't walk around in character offscreen, she doesn't try to dredge up her own emotions ... she tries to work strictly within the confines of the script and the character. To great results. Streep has said that all of her accents and stuff like that are not so much being prepared - but being overly prepared. She needs so much "permission" to play a part and feel that it is authentic that she OVER-prepares. She has laughed at how much she prepared for the one Irish-dancing scene in Dancing at Lughnasa - she trained with an Irish step-dancer for, like, 6 months. Is it necessary?? Well, it is for her. Every actress is different. Streep also does not make a big show out of being in character always ... but I have to say: Streep is one of the most inarticulate actresses out there, in terms of her own process. It's like DeNiro. These people just do not know how to talk about acting. They DO it. Streep said, when she came and talked at my school, "To me, talking about how I work is almost like talking about what I feel when I kneel in church and pray. It's just not in the realm of language. I know why I pray - but could I describe it?" Streep is not being self-important here. She is being on the level. Her work is secret, and somewhat magical (in my opinion).

So anyway - MacLaine and Streep - together now ... They have met the day before. But MacLaine felt that Streep was already in character - she kept calling her "Mommy" ... and this threw MacLaine off. Would she never get to know Streep herself?

And how perfect that kind of dynamic is for the particulars of Postcards, isn't it? Isn't the mother so afraid of being "shown up" by the daughter? And isn't the daughter sulkily afraid of "showing up" the mother? Streep has said in interviews that Shirley MacLaine was one of her favorite actresses growing up. She loved her diversity (singing, dancing, comedy, tragedy), and she loved her grace with her own fame. She was an idol of Streep's. So what do you want to bet (even though Streep doesn't talk about her own work) that Streep OVER-prepared (yet again) ... in order to feel she had "permission" to even go toe to toe with one of her idols. But Streep's process is so fluid you don't notice all of that. You know work has been done, obviously, but you're not sure exactly in what area.

So MacLaine's feeling of bafflement and also - that familiar feeling you get as an actor when you realize: "Holy shit. My scene partner is WALKING AWAY with this scene." is so human to me, so endearing. And I love how she talks about Streep - almost like she's a creature from another planet who needs to be studied under glass.

Good collaboration in acting is not about having a "You, first" attitude. It cannot be polite. You have to stake your claim in the scene, and if you're lucky - your scene partner can hold her own.

The first scene shot with the two of them together is a scene beloved by Postcards fans (of which I am one): the one where MacLaine comes to pick up Streep after her first day of work and they drive home in the car. Streep guzzles down M&Ms, MacLaine babbles on about Louis B. Mayer and work and also how her daughter needs to be more grateful for what she has ... and Streep makes snarky under-her-breath comments. They speak simultaneously the entire time. It's a tour de force - on BOTH sides - but what I love about the excerpt below is how MacLaine realized - at age 55, or however old she was - that, in the face of Meryl Streep - she needed to step up her game.

And isn't that exactly what is going on in Doris' mind in that film? That she needs to step up her game so she won't "lose" to her daughter?

Oh, and the relevant clip is below. The scene MacLaine describes is at the 7 minute mark. It's one of my favorites from the film. I love to watch the scene only focusing on Streep, and then rewinding and only focusing on MacLaine. Brill.

EXCERPT FROM Dance While You Can, by Shirley MacLaine

Meryl and I took our places in the front seat of the car. I quickly ran through the dialogue in my head. I knew Mike was a stickler for having precise rhythm with the words. He had a way of being so diplomatically kind with his insistent and correct discipline. He was an artist who had been hard on himself for years and, feeling happier lately, he had seemed to come to terms with his artistry and his desire to believe he was a man of great decency. I liked him a lot. I think he was feeling the same way about himself.

The cameras rolled (there were three of them), the process screen behind us cranked up, and Mike quietly yelled "Action".

There I was, playing a long scene with a woman I considered to be one of the great actresses in the world. I was required to play everything looking straight ahead, because I was driving the car. I couldn't look into Meryl's face. I couldn't really see what she was doing. I had all of the lines. She simply reacted. I knew she was eating M&M's as I spouted my dialogue. I heard her well-orchestrated chuckles and grunts in response to what I was saying, which seemed appropriate to her character and the scene. I knew she was wearing sunglasses to shield herself from the harsh world outside of the rehab clinic, and I could feel her seem to tolerate the colorful "mother's" dialogue as I plowed through the threepage scene, all of which, I thought, was written to enhance the character I was playing. I was wrong.

When I went to the "dailies" the next day, Meryl had, in my opinion, acted me off the screen. She seemed able to find comic nuances that I never dreamed were there, perfectly legitimate to her character and to the scene, without disturbing the balance. The woman was brilliant; and for the first time in my life, I felt that I was possibly outclassed.

This would be a new experience for me. She made me feel competitive, which I was uncomfortable with. I liked being friends with my fellow actors. I had always acted with people before. This felt like an exercise in simply staying in the race. Then i realized she wasn't even acting really; she was living the part of the daughter, who was suffering from comparison with the mother.

So as the days and our work progressed, we developed a relationship based on mutual respect and admiration. Because she was living her part, I can't say that I got to know her. For me it was an experience of hands-on observation of the seminal process of actually becoming a character; something I never wanted to do myself.

My working relationships with Anne Bancroft, Audrey Hepburn, Debra Winger, Shirley Booth, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Teri Garr, and many other fine actresses carried with them a certain personal intimacy, something of ourselves, apart from what we were playing.

With Meryl, I never had the pleasure of actually knowing her. But she happened to come along at a time in my life when I could recognize such a phenomenon as that of not being able to meet and know a part of myself. I couldn't seem to "get in there" far enough to know her as my daughter as well as she seemed to be able to know me as her mother. Central to my role, of course, was precisely the kind of self-centered unawareness of others that would naturally shut out any intimate understanding of another person. So perhaps I was more on the mark than I seemed to myself, but it was Meryl's vision and definable secrets in our screen relationship that belonged exclusively to her and that allowed her to forgive, and accept, and admire, and ultimately, to love that mother. She was able to mine the gold of our on-screen relationship as a one-person expedition, reaping the profits to her satisfaction and needing no one else to accomplish it. She was a magnificent one-woman band, playing and orchestrating her emotional instrument, oblivious to the fact that some of the rest of us felt as though we were acting alone. Perhaps that is the destiny of a real genius. Or put another way, perhaps that is the true meaning of channeling. When one channels divine talent, one is connected only to the source of it, and the physical presence of those who are also in attendance is irrelevant. A channeler puts aside the conscious mind and surrenders to another identity. That's the phenomenon I saw in Meryl.

Meryl could do what she does whether anyone else existed or not. Her thrill in acting seemed to come from abdicating her own identity completely and becoming someone else. It was an identity decision I had never been able to make, nor did I want to. But, as I worked with her, the mystery of why and how she did it filled my days with confused wonder. Was the basis of her ability founded on complete knowledge of surrendering herself or complete detachment from who she was? Or was she a consummate technician who had researched her character thoroughly?

Since I had become such an ardent student of consciousness and inner reality, she served as an archetypical example for me. To me, acting itself had become a metaphor for life. We could each choose how we would approach our own truth, much in the same way we approached our roles. We were both blessed and cursed with the canvas of freedom we had at our disposal. We could make our illusion any reality we chose. And the million choices open to us with each character were open to us in our own lives as well. We could play with each other or we could play alone. We could believe our inner fantasies and make them work for us in the "real" world, or we could believe only in the objective world and, as a result, feel the inner isolation of emptiness. Of course, one was not mutually exclusive of the other. The trick was how to balance the two.

The Books: "Dance While You Can" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Dance While You Can, by Shirley MacLaine

Dance While You Can came out in the early 90s. Now it can't be said that MacLaine ever really had a dry period - that's one of the amazing things about her career. She has said that she started to play "character parts" (meaning: NOT leading ladies, NOT romantic leads) early - most women hold on to their leading lady status as long as they can ... then they go into a blackout period of about 10 to 15 years - and emerge, as older women, ready to play character parts. (That is, if the actress is successful in the first place). MacLaine was nothing if not practical. She always was. It's her dance training. She was the kind of person who dreamt as a child of one thing and one thing only: to be a prima ballerina. So she studied, spent every night in dance class - as a kid! - and actually went quite far in developing herself. But in her late teens, she came to the painful realization that she just was not good enough. She would never get out of the corps, and that was not the life she wanted for herself. So she "switched" to acting. This is a decision so hard to make that many people in her position put it off and put it off until it is too late. The business is full of bitter sad people who just didn't live the life they WANTED to live. Not MacLaine. She gutted it out, let the dream of dancing go (although not entirely, of course), and changed track. But her career is full of such moments - and it was a conscious decision, in her 30s, to start playing the "character" parts ... She wasn't afraid to play older than she was, she wasn't afraid to play eccentrics, she would rather WORK than try to hold on to her status as a leading lady. This is a rare thing. You can see the success of it in her career.

She was nominated for an Oscar time and time again. Shirley MacLaine has vanity, just like the rest of us - she keeps her body in shape, she cultivates herself, she always looks fabulous when you see her out in public - but on screen? She didn't care. Like the scene at the end of Terms of Endearment in the hospital, when you can see she hasn't dyed her hair and her dark roots are showing, and she looks like hell. This isn't an affectation, this isn't playing "ugly" - this is dedication to the reality of whatever character she is playing. She knew that longevity resided in character parts. Leading ladies have a shelf life. Character actors are forever.

Dance While You Can is primarily an investigation into family relationships - MacLaine's relationship with her parents, as well as her daughter Sachi ... not always smooth sailing ... but full of lessons learned. And so MacLaine, focusing on Postcards for the entirety of the book, with its entire plot having to do with family, and dealing with parental expectations, and old regrets, and all that family CRAP ... makes sense. MacLaine tries to make amends in the book to her daughter Sachi - who spent much of her childhood in Japan, at an international school, and MacLaine cannot forgive herself for "abandoning" her there. She doesn't "know" her daughter, in many ways.

In 1990, she appeared in Postcards from the Edge with Meryl Streep. She was lifelong friends with Debbie Reynolds and so the chance to 'play her' was really fun for MacLaine ... not to mention the fact that she had never worked with Streep.

And here (in the excerpt below) her practicality comes to the fore again. MacLaine is an odd and interesting mix of humility (a true dancer's mindset) and confidence. When she finally won an Oscar for Terms of Endearment after a million nominations she said in her acceptance speech, "I deserve this." She knows she's a good actress. And the Terms set was a notoriously tempestuous one, and Debra Winger and she did not (to put it mildly) get along. But whatever happened offscreen stayed offscreen - or that particular brand of tension and fear of the other was translated into the sparks-flying too-intense mother-daughter relationship. Whatever alchemy was going on, it doesn't matter. MacLaine had made it through and triumphed. It's one of my favorite MacLaine performances. But my point here is that MacLaine does not have a shrinking ego, and she is not intimidated easily. She's worked with Hitchcock, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder, Anne Bancroft - great great people. She knows she's good. She knows she's fortunate, too, but she knows she's good.

I set it up this way because MacLaine has told the story in the excerpt below before - about how, during her first scene with Meryl Streep in Postcards ... she thought she was doing fine, then they went and watched the dailies - and she realized how much Meryl Streep was acting her off the screen. Her description of that moment is interesting - and there's much to discuss. It sounds as though Meryl Streep is in her own little world, creating her character, not really interacting with MacLaine - just doing her own brilliant thing individually. Is that right? What about collaboration? HOWEVER: if you think about the relationship of mother and daughter in Postcards - and how they talk OVER each other, without ever really hearing ... how each character is so wrapped up in her own ego and her own needs that all she sees in the other is an obstacle ... you can see that (as always) there was a method to Streep's madness. MacLaine and Streep work differently. MacLaine is a good actress of the old school. She doesn't walk around in character offscreen, she doesn't try to dredge up her own emotions ... she tries to work strictly within the confines of the script and the character. To great results. Streep has said that all of her accents and stuff like that are not so much being prepared - but being overly prepared. She needs so much "permission" to play a part and feel that it is authentic that she OVER-prepares. She has laughed at how much she prepared for the one Irish-dancing scene in Dancing at Lughnasa - she trained with an Irish step-dancer for, like, 6 months. Is it necessary?? Well, it is for her. Every actress is different. Streep also does not make a big show out of being in character always ... but I have to say: Streep is one of the most inarticulate actresses out there, in terms of her own process. It's like DeNiro. These people just do not know how to talk about acting. They DO it. Streep said, when she came and talked at my school, "To me, talking about how I work is almost like talking about what I feel when I kneel in church and pray. It's just not in the realm of language. I know why I pray - but could I describe it?" Streep is not being self-important here. She is being on the level. Her work is secret, and somewhat magical (in my opinion).

So anyway - MacLaine and Streep - together now ... They have met the day before. But MacLaine felt that Streep was already in character - she kept calling her "Mommy" ... and this threw MacLaine off. Would she never get to know Streep herself?

And how perfect that kind of dynamic is for the particulars of Postcards, isn't it? Isn't the mother so afraid of being "shown up" by the daughter? And isn't the daughter sulkily afraid of "showing up" the mother? Streep has said in interviews that Shirley MacLaine was one of her favorite actresses growing up. She loved her diversity (singing, dancing, comedy, tragedy), and she loved her grace with her own fame. She was an idol of Streep's. So what do you want to bet (even though Streep doesn't talk about her own work) that Streep OVER-prepared (yet again) ... in order to feel she had "permission" to even go toe to toe with one of her idols. But Streep's process is so fluid you don't notice all of that. You know work has been done, obviously, but you're not sure exactly in what area.

So MacLaine's feeling of bafflement and also - that familiar feeling you get as an actor when you realize: "Holy shit. My scene partner is WALKING AWAY with this scene." is so human to me, so endearing. And I love how she talks about Streep - almost like she's a creature from another planet who needs to be studied under glass.

Good collaboration in acting is not about having a "You, first" attitude. It cannot be polite. You have to stake your claim in the scene, and if you're lucky - your scene partner can hold her own.

The first scene shot with the two of them together is a scene beloved by Postcards fans (of which I am one): the one where MacLaine comes to pick up Streep after her first day of work and they drive home in the car. Streep guzzles down M&Ms, MacLaine babbles on about Louis B. Mayer and work and also how her daughter needs to be more grateful for what she has ... and Streep makes snarky under-her-breath comments. They speak simultaneously the entire time. It's a tour de force - on BOTH sides - but what I love about the excerpt below is how MacLaine realized - at age 55, or however old she was - that, in the face of Meryl Streep - she needed to step up her game.

And isn't that exactly what is going on in Doris' mind in that film? That she needs to step up her game so she won't "lose" to her daughter?

Oh, and the relevant clip is below. The scene MacLaine describes is at the 7 minute mark. It's one of my favorites from the film. I love to watch the scene only focusing on Streep, and then rewinding and only focusing on MacLaine. Brill.

EXCERPT FROM Dance While You Can, by Shirley MacLaine

Meryl and I took our places in the front seat of the car. I quickly ran through the dialogue in my head. I knew Mike was a stickler for having precise rhythm with the words. He had a way of being so diplomatically kind with his insistent and correct discipline. He was an artist who had been hard on himself for years and, feeling happier lately, he had seemed to come to terms with his artistry and his desire to believe he was a man of great decency. I liked him a lot. I think he was feeling the same way about himself.

The cameras rolled (there were three of them), the process screen behind us cranked up, and Mike quietly yelled "Action".

There I was, playing a long scene with a woman I considered to be one of the great actresses in the world. I was required to play everything looking straight ahead, because I was driving the car. I couldn't look into Meryl's face. I couldn't really see what she was doing. I had all of the lines. She simply reacted. I knew she was eating M&M's as I spouted my dialogue. I heard her well-orchestrated chuckles and grunts in response to what I was saying, which seemed appropriate to her character and the scene. I knew she was wearing sunglasses to shield herself from the harsh world outside of the rehab clinic, and I could feel her seem to tolerate the colorful "mother's" dialogue as I plowed through the threepage scene, all of which, I thought, was written to enhance the character I was playing. I was wrong.

When I went to the "dailies" the next day, Meryl had, in my opinion, acted me off the screen. She seemed able to find comic nuances that I never dreamed were there, perfectly legitimate to her character and to the scene, without disturbing the balance. The woman was brilliant; and for the first time in my life, I felt that I was possibly outclassed.

This would be a new experience for me. She made me feel competitive, which I was uncomfortable with. I liked being friends with my fellow actors. I had always acted with people before. This felt like an exercise in simply staying in the race. Then i realized she wasn't even acting really; she was living the part of the daughter, who was suffering from comparison with the mother.

So as the days and our work progressed, we developed a relationship based on mutual respect and admiration. Because she was living her part, I can't say that I got to know her. For me it was an experience of hands-on observation of the seminal process of actually becoming a character; something I never wanted to do myself.

My working relationships with Anne Bancroft, Audrey Hepburn, Debra Winger, Shirley Booth, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Teri Garr, and many other fine actresses carried with them a certain personal intimacy, something of ourselves, apart from what we were playing.

With Meryl, I never had the pleasure of actually knowing her. But she happened to come along at a time in my life when I could recognize such a phenomenon as that of not being able to meet and know a part of myself. I couldn't seem to "get in there" far enough to know her as my daughter as well as she seemed to be able to know me as her mother. Central to my role, of course, was precisely the kind of self-centered unawareness of others that would naturally shut out any intimate understanding of another person. So perhaps I was more on the mark than I seemed to myself, but it was Meryl's vision and definable secrets in our screen relationship that belonged exclusively to her and that allowed her to forgive, and accept, and admire, and ultimately, to love that mother. She was able to mine the gold of our on-screen relationship as a one-person expedition, reaping the profits to her satisfaction and needing no one else to accomplish it. She was a magnificent one-woman band, playing and orchestrating her emotional instrument, oblivious to the fact that some of the rest of us felt as though we were acting alone. Perhaps that is the destiny of a real genius. Or put another way, perhaps that is the true meaning of channeling. When one channels divine talent, one is connected only to the source of it, and the physical presence of those who are also in attendance is irrelevant. A channeler puts aside the conscious mind and surrenders to another identity. That's the phenomenon I saw in Meryl.

Meryl could do what she does whether anyone else existed or not. Her thrill in acting seemed to come from abdicating her own identity completely and becoming someone else. It was an identity decision I had never been able to make, nor did I want to. But, as I worked with her, the mystery of why and how she did it filled my days with confused wonder. Was the basis of her ability founded on complete knowledge of surrendering herself or complete detachment from who she was? Or was she a consummate technician who had researched her character thoroughly?

Since I had become such an ardent student of consciousness and inner reality, she served as an archetypical example for me. To me, acting itself had become a metaphor for life. We could each choose how we would approach our own truth, much in the same way we approached our roles. We were both blessed and cursed with the canvas of freedom we had at our disposal. We could make our illusion any reality we chose. And the million choices open to us with each character were open to us in our own lives as well. We could play with each other or we could play alone. We could believe our inner fantasies and make them work for us in the "real" world, or we could believe only in the objective world and, as a result, feel the inner isolation of emptiness. Of course, one was not mutually exclusive of the other. The trick was how to balance the two.

The Books: "Out On a Limb" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

This is the book that tipped her over the edge onto a whole other level of wide-spread cultural consciousness. Out on a Limb was 15 weeks on the NY TImes bestseller list and still, to this day, probably makes her more money a year than she ever made from her films. It was a Bridge Across Forever-type book, or a Secret-type book. It hit. I wonder if there were intimations beforehand of how huge this book was going to be. It must have been very gratifying for MacLaine to realize that what she had to say really resonated with millions of people. It's her third book, I believe - and this is the one where she talks about her investigation into reincarnation and past lives, a spiritual quest. It came out in 1983. It was a smash hit. An Academy-Award winning actress is obviously a person with some level of fame - but this kind of Deepak Chopra-Jonathan Livingston Seagull brand of fame was different.

Thankfully, she kept her sense of humor about it all (appearing as herself in the Alfred Brooks comedy Defending Your Life, for example, where she plays a hostess at the "Past Lives Cafe" ... she had her own thoughts and feelings and beliefs, but she wasn't afraid to make fun of it as well, or to lighten the mood.)

Out On a Limb is not, strictly, autobiography - and she comes right out and says it. Certain characters have been made up, some people have been melded together ... it's not meant to be a literal representation ... it's about a quest, a series of questions, and some experiences she had - in Stockholm, England, Malibu ... that made her really question where she came from, and what she thinks happens after we die. She's made characters "composites" ... but you'd never know (in my opinion) from the way she wrote the book. Gerry, for example, emerges as a totally real and believable character. David ... another one. Cat ... the woman who calls MacLaine in a teasing voice, "Fickle Fame Lady" - "Hey, good morning, fickle fame lady!" At first, MacLaine is put off by the words, as well as the tone ... is she being made fun of? But soon she realized ... wait a minute ... my relationship with my own fame IS fickle ... I've always had to 'go off' and be anonymous for long stretches of time in order to balance out the public life I have to leave ... so "fickle fame lady" is ACCURATE. Anyway, whether or not these people are composites - I don't care. MacLaine knows how to write them so that they come to life.

It becomes not so much an investigation into what her beliefs can do for her ... but a journey that has its own rules, it takes her where IT wants her to go, and along the way, she has to make choices: Do I want to take this next step? Some of it is not easy for her - and she writes about that eloquently. She's just as good with the struggle as she is with the moments of breakthrough.

I suppose it would be typical of me to weigh in on my own beliefs as compared to hers, but yeah, I'm not about that on this here blog. Especially not in a post such as this one. It's really not my place, anyway. What do my beliefs matter? They're mine. Hers are hers. So? (On a side note, I find it kind of funny when someone - a new reader - enters into my Search box on my site stuff like: "Christian" "Is Sheila a Christian" "religion" "religious beliefs" "Christian" ... it's all the same IP address and I can sense the increasing desperation and frustration in their Search terms. "God", "baptism", "Jesus Christ", "the light of the world" ... I know they'll come up with nada, (well, actually, now they won't - they'll come to this post! Hooray!) so that's why it's rather funny - similar to the people who put the following Search terms into the box: "Iraq" "Bush" "abortion" "war" "Obama" ... I know these people are going to come up with slim pickins, but some of them seem ferociously determined to find out my view on the issues - which, again, strikes me as bizarre. I mean, take one look at my site. There are pictures of James Dean everywhere, why are you trying to find out my views on abortion? People are weird, that's all. But most of all, I see the "is Sheila a Christian" question. Seems REALLY important to some people to know the answer! First of all: wow. Why do you want to know? You seem actually nervous about it - like: there's so much on this site: book reviews, movie reviews, personal stories ... Yet you need to know the answer to THAT before you continue reading? Is that what's going on? Second of all: LOOK AT MY GODDAMN NAME and take a wild guess at what my religious upbringing was. Third of all: do you want to know the answer so that you know how to listen to me, so that you know how to categorize me? If that is the case: then I have nothing but contempt for you. If you're just curious, then that's cool - although I highly doubt it. You should listen to me because you like my voice - and you should NOT listen to me if you DON'T like my voice. If it's a litmus test thing you're looking for, then ... well. That's just sad. Many Christians are wonderful writers. I read many sites written by Christians. Not because of their beliefs, for God's sake, but because of the writing skill. Plenty of Christians are douchebags as well as horrible writers. So I don't read those people. I have no litmust-test in regards to lifestyle/outlook/surface trappings/political convictions ... But maybe the nervous-Search-term-nellies only feel comfortable with someone AFTER they know the person's religion ... but again: I have no respect for that point of view either. UPDATE: Interesting: my friend Ted is now reading Middlemarch and has put some of his thoughts about the book in this post here. There is a bit of synchronicity - in his thoughts and mine. Ted writes:

'If someone's nature is not like mine it cannot be good.' I think that is the saddest opinion one can hold.

Me too.

The real question, for me, in terms of Shirley MacLaine is: can she write? Yes, she can.

Here's an excerpt I love. It's actually not one of the more "out there" excerpts ... but for some reason, it stuck with me the most.

I just think that the details she chooses to share - in evoking her parents - are perfect. I can just see them. They pop off the page and come to life. Good writing is usually local, meaning: it is not generalized. Good writing rarely uses assumptions or shorthand. MacLaine takes the time here to describe her parents - in ways that are localized. They are hers.

And if you read the excerpt, you'll see that one of the specific descriptions of her mother is echoed by one of the photos of her here. I couldn't believe it when I found the photo and had to immediately scoop it up - "that's her mother! She's 'channeling' her mother!". I am sure it was an unconscious imitation of her mother ... or maybe it's a coincidence ... but after spending some time with Shirley MacLaine in this book, you're never quite comfortable brushing something off as a "coincidence". Nevertheless, whatever it all "means", it did strike me and I thought it was cool.

But tell me her parents don't come alive in the following excerpt!

EXCERPT FROM Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

I leaned over and turned on the tub faucet. Warm water always made me feel better. Often, no matter where I was in the world, a tub of warm water could change my spirits into happiness.

Now as I simply held my hands under the warm flow I began to feel more relaxed.

I sighed to myself, climbing into the hot VitaBath soap suds. I thought of my mother. She loved hot baths, too. I remembered how she'd sit in the tub and just think. I always wondered if she might be thinking about how to get out ... how to get out of her life. It seemed as though everything Mother did, she did for Dad. And after him, for her children. It was the same story with everyone else's mother, I guess. Her cooking was punctuated by deep sighs. Often she would manage to burn something, and then she would have to wring her hands. Her lovely hands were the most expressive part of her. I always knew how she felt by watching her long, slim fingers, for they never stopped twisting or being busy with something around her neck or wrists. She was either fiddling with a high-necked sweater (wool against her skin bothered her) or toying with her silver chains. I understood that she enjoyed the sensuality of the chains slipping through her fingers. But there was a contradiction because I sometimes felt she would choke herself out of frustration. I wanted to understand the contradiction, scream for her to clarify what she was feeling - but when she reached a certain pitch of desperation, before I could sort out my own thinking, she'd launch into another project like peeling potatoes or making scotch cakes.

Dad knew that Mother had wanted to be an actress, so he said that most of what she was doing was a performance. The two of them, in fact, were like a pair of vaudevillians. I thought I remembered Dad saying something about wanting to run away with a circus when he was fourteen. He loved railway cars and traveling and said that he felt he wouldn't even have needed make-up to play a clown. And he hd a way of commanding attention like no one I've seen before or since. He usually did it with his pipe. Regardless of where he sat in a room, it became the center. His chair would become a stage and his friends or family, the audience. He'd crook one leg over the other, pick up his pipe and knock it against the heel of his shoe, as though he were bringing a meeting to order. A tiny chunk of ash would spill from the bowl of his pipe onto the carpet beneath him.

The roomful of people would by now be uneasily watchful. Then he'd sigh deeply, uncrook his leg, grunt a little, and proceed to bend over to determine what to do about the ash. This was the master attention-getter. Would he pick it up? Would he gently squeeze the hunk of ash between his fingers so he wouldn't crush it into powder? Or would he rifle for a matchbook cover in the top drawer of his little pipe stand beside his chair and scoop it up? It never occurred to anyone watching to go to his rescue. This was a scientifically manipulated exercise of such commanding expertise that it would have been like rushing to the stage to help Laurence Olivier recover a prop he had purposely dropped.

Usually Dad picked the ash up with the matchbook cover. However, in mid-bend, out of he corner of his eye, he would spot a piece of lint on the shoulder of his jacket. With the pipe in one hand, matchbook cover in the other, the focus of attention on the ashes, he would slowly but surely proceed to flick any discernible flecks of lint he could find while everyone in the room waited on the fate of the ashes. His complete capture of attention accomplished, he was a happy man. If, however, no one paid any attention, Dad would get unmercifully drunk.

Mother would usually get up and go to the bathroom, returning after she sensed that Dad's act had run its course, to suggest a nice hot piece of apple pie that she had baked herself. In striding toward the kitchen maybe she'd bump into a piece of furniture which would produce a startled gesture of sympathy from whoever was closest. Meanwhile Dad would suck on his pipe, drink slowly from a glass of scotch and milk, not moving, knowing that Mother had successfully stolen his thunder, trying to understand that every play must have more than one central character. No wonder Warren and I became actors: we learned from the best.

Mother had done a Little Theater play once, all about a mother who went slowly bananas. Rehearsals took her away from the house at least four nights a week. So Dad began to complain that he never had hot meals waiting for him anymore and that there was dust on the mantelpiece. He teased Mother, said that she was becoming a replica of that "bitch" she was playing in that "damn fool play" and warned her that conditions at home were slowly deteriorating. Little by little Mother began to succumb to his pressure. Her gracefully chiseled nose pinched up when she tried to express herself and her speech patterns became erratic. Soon she agreed that she had become the character and therefore it wasn't worth it. So she quit the play. She had bought Dad's propaganda, and come back home to tend her family.

Growing up, I too did what was expected of me. I wore standard white blouses, unscuffed saddle oxford shoes, bobby sox rolled down over nylon stockings, and pleated skirts that I neatly tucked under me when I sat down. I brushed my hair one hundred strokes every night and I finished my homework and I might have been Football Queen if my boyfriend hadn't gotten sick the day the team made their nominations and screwed up my chances. I had a bright-new-penny smile for everyone and never allowed myself to get overtly angry at anybody, because you could never tell where the crucial popularity vote might come from during the next election for Prom Queen. I went on hayrides but wouldn't do more than kiss. I was a good student but only because I learned how to cheat well. I had real "school spirit", wore the school colors at all times and when I heard the roll of the school drums before a ballgame my heart would pop with pride. I spent a lot of time after school smoking and carousing in cars with boys ... always teasing but never going all the way because Mother had said I should be a virgin when I got married, since my husband would know if I wasn't. Still, I had to sneak around, because Mom and Dad were more worried about my reputation than what I might actually be doing.

I laughed a lot, mostly out of tenseness, as a kind of outlet for suppressed feelings that often bordered on hysteria. Laughter was a life saver to me. But apparently it upset people too. My friends took to calling me "Silly Squirrely" because I laughed at most anything. They thought I was happy-go-lucky and my "carefreeness" was a topic of conversation. They said I was "such a nut" which I accepted as a compliment at first until I began to realize there was really something wrong. One day in the hallway I was holding hands with Dick McNulty. He told me a joke and I began to laugh. But I couldn't stop and with a kind of theatrical glee that I didn't want to control I began to scream with laughter. I laughed and laughed until the principal came and ordered the nurse to take me home. Dad and Mom only wanted to know why I had been holding hands in the hall. They didn't seem to be interested in why I was laughing so hard.

Dick McNulty was the first boy I ever loved. Three years later he was killed in Korea.

The Books: "Out On a Limb" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

This is the book that tipped her over the edge onto a whole other level of wide-spread cultural consciousness. Out on a Limb was 15 weeks on the NY TImes bestseller list and still, to this day, probably makes her more money a year than she ever made from her films. It was a Bridge Across Forever-type book, or a Secret-type book. It hit. I wonder if there were intimations beforehand of how huge this book was going to be. It must have been very gratifying for MacLaine to realize that what she had to say really resonated with millions of people. It's her third book, I believe - and this is the one where she talks about her investigation into reincarnation and past lives, a spiritual quest. It came out in 1983. It was a smash hit. An Academy-Award winning actress is obviously a person with some level of fame - but this kind of Deepak Chopra-Jonathan Livingston Seagull brand of fame was different.

Thankfully, she kept her sense of humor about it all (appearing as herself in the Alfred Brooks comedy Defending Your Life, for example, where she plays a hostess at the "Past Lives Cafe" ... she had her own thoughts and feelings and beliefs, but she wasn't afraid to make fun of it as well, or to lighten the mood.)

Out On a Limb is not, strictly, autobiography - and she comes right out and says it. Certain characters have been made up, some people have been melded together ... it's not meant to be a literal representation ... it's about a quest, a series of questions, and some experiences she had - in Stockholm, England, Malibu ... that made her really question where she came from, and what she thinks happens after we die. She's made characters "composites" ... but you'd never know (in my opinion) from the way she wrote the book. Gerry, for example, emerges as a totally real and believable character. David ... another one. Cat ... the woman who calls MacLaine in a teasing voice, "Fickle Fame Lady" - "Hey, good morning, fickle fame lady!" At first, MacLaine is put off by the words, as well as the tone ... is she being made fun of? But soon she realized ... wait a minute ... my relationship with my own fame IS fickle ... I've always had to 'go off' and be anonymous for long stretches of time in order to balance out the public life I have to leave ... so "fickle fame lady" is ACCURATE. Anyway, whether or not these people are composites - I don't care. MacLaine knows how to write them so that they come to life.

It becomes not so much an investigation into what her beliefs can do for her ... but a journey that has its own rules, it takes her where IT wants her to go, and along the way, she has to make choices: Do I want to take this next step? Some of it is not easy for her - and she writes about that eloquently. She's just as good with the struggle as she is with the moments of breakthrough.

I suppose it would be typical of me to weigh in on my own beliefs as compared to hers, but yeah, I'm not about that on this here blog. Especially not in a post such as this one. It's really not my place, anyway. What do my beliefs matter? They're mine. Hers are hers. So? (On a side note, I find it kind of funny when someone - a new reader - enters into my Search box on my site stuff like: "Christian" "Is Sheila a Christian" "religion" "religious beliefs" "Christian" ... it's all the same IP address and I can sense the increasing desperation and frustration in their Search terms. "God", "baptism", "Jesus Christ", "the light of the world" ... I know they'll come up with nada, (well, actually, now they won't - they'll come to this post! Hooray!) so that's why it's rather funny - similar to the people who put the following Search terms into the box: "Iraq" "Bush" "abortion" "war" "Obama" ... I know these people are going to come up with slim pickins, but some of them seem ferociously determined to find out my view on the issues - which, again, strikes me as bizarre. I mean, take one look at my site. There are pictures of James Dean everywhere, why are you trying to find out my views on abortion? People are weird, that's all. But most of all, I see the "is Sheila a Christian" question. Seems REALLY important to some people to know the answer! First of all: wow. Why do you want to know? You seem actually nervous about it - like: there's so much on this site: book reviews, movie reviews, personal stories ... Yet you need to know the answer to THAT before you continue reading? Is that what's going on? Second of all: LOOK AT MY GODDAMN NAME and take a wild guess at what my religious upbringing was. Third of all: do you want to know the answer so that you know how to listen to me, so that you know how to categorize me? If that is the case: then I have nothing but contempt for you. If you're just curious, then that's cool - although I highly doubt it. You should listen to me because you like my voice - and you should NOT listen to me if you DON'T like my voice. If it's a litmus test thing you're looking for, then ... well. That's just sad. Many Christians are wonderful writers. I read many sites written by Christians. Not because of their beliefs, for God's sake, but because of the writing skill. Plenty of Christians are douchebags as well as horrible writers. So I don't read those people. I have no litmust-test in regards to lifestyle/outlook/surface trappings/political convictions ... But maybe the nervous-Search-term-nellies only feel comfortable with someone AFTER they know the person's religion ... but again: I have no respect for that point of view either. UPDATE: Interesting: my friend Ted is now reading Middlemarch and has put some of his thoughts about the book in this post here. There is a bit of synchronicity - in his thoughts and mine. Ted writes:

'If someone's nature is not like mine it cannot be good.' I think that is the saddest opinion one can hold.

Me too.

The real question, for me, in terms of Shirley MacLaine is: can she write? Yes, she can.

Here's an excerpt I love. It's actually not one of the more "out there" excerpts ... but for some reason, it stuck with me the most.

I just think that the details she chooses to share - in evoking her parents - are perfect. I can just see them. They pop off the page and come to life. Good writing is usually local, meaning: it is not generalized. Good writing rarely uses assumptions or shorthand. MacLaine takes the time here to describe her parents - in ways that are localized. They are hers.

And if you read the excerpt, you'll see that one of the specific descriptions of her mother is echoed by one of the photos of her here. I couldn't believe it when I found the photo and had to immediately scoop it up - "that's her mother! She's 'channeling' her mother!". I am sure it was an unconscious imitation of her mother ... or maybe it's a coincidence ... but after spending some time with Shirley MacLaine in this book, you're never quite comfortable brushing something off as a "coincidence". Nevertheless, whatever it all "means", it did strike me and I thought it was cool.

But tell me her parents don't come alive in the following excerpt!

EXCERPT FROM Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

I leaned over and turned on the tub faucet. Warm water always made me feel better. Often, no matter where I was in the world, a tub of warm water could change my spirits into happiness.

Now as I simply held my hands under the warm flow I began to feel more relaxed.

I sighed to myself, climbing into the hot VitaBath soap suds. I thought of my mother. She loved hot baths, too. I remembered how she'd sit in the tub and just think. I always wondered if she might be thinking about how to get out ... how to get out of her life. It seemed as though everything Mother did, she did for Dad. And after him, for her children. It was the same story with everyone else's mother, I guess. Her cooking was punctuated by deep sighs. Often she would manage to burn something, and then she would have to wring her hands. Her lovely hands were the most expressive part of her. I always knew how she felt by watching her long, slim fingers, for they never stopped twisting or being busy with something around her neck or wrists. She was either fiddling with a high-necked sweater (wool against her skin bothered her) or toying with her silver chains. I understood that she enjoyed the sensuality of the chains slipping through her fingers. But there was a contradiction because I sometimes felt she would choke herself out of frustration. I wanted to understand the contradiction, scream for her to clarify what she was feeling - but when she reached a certain pitch of desperation, before I could sort out my own thinking, she'd launch into another project like peeling potatoes or making scotch cakes.

Dad knew that Mother had wanted to be an actress, so he said that most of what she was doing was a performance. The two of them, in fact, were like a pair of vaudevillians. I thought I remembered Dad saying something about wanting to run away with a circus when he was fourteen. He loved railway cars and traveling and said that he felt he wouldn't even have needed make-up to play a clown. And he hd a way of commanding attention like no one I've seen before or since. He usually did it with his pipe. Regardless of where he sat in a room, it became the center. His chair would become a stage and his friends or family, the audience. He'd crook one leg over the other, pick up his pipe and knock it against the heel of his shoe, as though he were bringing a meeting to order. A tiny chunk of ash would spill from the bowl of his pipe onto the carpet beneath him.

The roomful of people would by now be uneasily watchful. Then he'd sigh deeply, uncrook his leg, grunt a little, and proceed to bend over to determine what to do about the ash. This was the master attention-getter. Would he pick it up? Would he gently squeeze the hunk of ash between his fingers so he wouldn't crush it into powder? Or would he rifle for a matchbook cover in the top drawer of his little pipe stand beside his chair and scoop it up? It never occurred to anyone watching to go to his rescue. This was a scientifically manipulated exercise of such commanding expertise that it would have been like rushing to the stage to help Laurence Olivier recover a prop he had purposely dropped.

Usually Dad picked the ash up with the matchbook cover. However, in mid-bend, out of he corner of his eye, he would spot a piece of lint on the shoulder of his jacket. With the pipe in one hand, matchbook cover in the other, the focus of attention on the ashes, he would slowly but surely proceed to flick any discernible flecks of lint he could find while everyone in the room waited on the fate of the ashes. His complete capture of attention accomplished, he was a happy man. If, however, no one paid any attention, Dad would get unmercifully drunk.

Mother would usually get up and go to the bathroom, returning after she sensed that Dad's act had run its course, to suggest a nice hot piece of apple pie that she had baked herself. In striding toward the kitchen maybe she'd bump into a piece of furniture which would produce a startled gesture of sympathy from whoever was closest. Meanwhile Dad would suck on his pipe, drink slowly from a glass of scotch and milk, not moving, knowing that Mother had successfully stolen his thunder, trying to understand that every play must have more than one central character. No wonder Warren and I became actors: we learned from the best.

Mother had done a Little Theater play once, all about a mother who went slowly bananas. Rehearsals took her away from the house at least four nights a week. So Dad began to complain that he never had hot meals waiting for him anymore and that there was dust on the mantelpiece. He teased Mother, said that she was becoming a replica of that "bitch" she was playing in that "damn fool play" and warned her that conditions at home were slowly deteriorating. Little by little Mother began to succumb to his pressure. Her gracefully chiseled nose pinched up when she tried to express herself and her speech patterns became erratic. Soon she agreed that she had become the character and therefore it wasn't worth it. So she quit the play. She had bought Dad's propaganda, and come back home to tend her family.

Growing up, I too did what was expected of me. I wore standard white blouses, unscuffed saddle oxford shoes, bobby sox rolled down over nylon stockings, and pleated skirts that I neatly tucked under me when I sat down. I brushed my hair one hundred strokes every night and I finished my homework and I might have been Football Queen if my boyfriend hadn't gotten sick the day the team made their nominations and screwed up my chances. I had a bright-new-penny smile for everyone and never allowed myself to get overtly angry at anybody, because you could never tell where the crucial popularity vote might come from during the next election for Prom Queen. I went on hayrides but wouldn't do more than kiss. I was a good student but only because I learned how to cheat well. I had real "school spirit", wore the school colors at all times and when I heard the roll of the school drums before a ballgame my heart would pop with pride. I spent a lot of time after school smoking and carousing in cars with boys ... always teasing but never going all the way because Mother had said I should be a virgin when I got married, since my husband would know if I wasn't. Still, I had to sneak around, because Mom and Dad were more worried about my reputation than what I might actually be doing.

I laughed a lot, mostly out of tenseness, as a kind of outlet for suppressed feelings that often bordered on hysteria. Laughter was a life saver to me. But apparently it upset people too. My friends took to calling me "Silly Squirrely" because I laughed at most anything. They thought I was happy-go-lucky and my "carefreeness" was a topic of conversation. They said I was "such a nut" which I accepted as a compliment at first until I began to realize there was really something wrong. One day in the hallway I was holding hands with Dick McNulty. He told me a joke and I began to laugh. But I couldn't stop and with a kind of theatrical glee that I didn't want to control I began to scream with laughter. I laughed and laughed until the principal came and ordered the nurse to take me home. Dad and Mom only wanted to know why I had been holding hands in the hall. They didn't seem to be interested in why I was laughing so hard.

Dick McNulty was the first boy I ever loved. Three years later he was killed in Korea.

The Books: "Don't Fall Off the Mountain" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Don't Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

I wonder if Shirley MacLaine is bad at anything. I'm sure she is - and so she doesn't spend her energies in those areas ... or who knows. Maybe she just works her ass off (I know that is true ... this woman works. It's her dance training. Those people have discipline, man. You could be decapitated and still not miss a dance class.) She's written a ton of books - some new age ones, and others autobiographies - and they're fantastic. She's a writer, too. Not just chattering about her life to a ghost writer and having an editor whip it into shape ... She IS a writer. She talks about her writing process (when she "feels" the muse, and when she doesn't, where she needs to be, what her office needs to be like - all very writer-ish concerns - She knows it isn't EASY - unlike some people who say what are possibly the most insulting words in the history of the English language: "I could write a great book if I only had the time." Uh-huh. So the only difference between you and, say, Hemingway, is HE HAD THE TIME?) MacLaine knows writing is a craft, like any other, so she works at it. MacLaine has said that even in childhood, spending so much time at the dance studio, she also knew she was a writer. Anyway, this is just to say I adore her books. Sometimes they're a bit kooky for me - but they are ALWAYS sincere. They represent a woman who has truly been on a journey ... of self-discovery, and questions, and curiosity ... Compare this to the condescending tone of Ms. Paltrow's GOOP ("My life is great because I'm not passive") ... and you will see such a difference. MacLaine has none of that snotty "I'm more enlightened" thing going on. Maybe she does now, but hell, the woman is 300 years old. I hope I can be a little bit snotty at age 300 about what I feel I have learned. What I like about her stuff is that she is honest. She doesn't come off as perfect or enlightened in her books. She comes off as ... human. Making mistakes, hurting people by accident, having to make amends ... looking back on some of her choices with regrets ... trying to be okay with who she was when she was younger ... It's my type of memoir. (And I'm lucky because she's written, what, 26 memoirs??)

Her stories about her childhood (you know, with her younger brother, Warren freakin' Beatty) are very touching. She sensed, very early on, that her mother had a lot of thwarted dreams and so she poured all of that unexpressed creativity into her children - and when they became famous (and MacLaine always felt that the two of them HAD to become famous, in order to fulfill their parents' dreams for them) ... it was as though their parents were living THROUGH them. On her death bed, Shirley's mother expressed to Shirley her envy ... that Shirley was living the life SHE wanted to have lived ... and in a strange way, it was a relief for MacLaine to hear that ... because she had always sensed it. Her parents sound like wonderful people.

MacLaine was a dancer. That was her training. She had weak ankles, which was a big problem for her ... but she learned to work around it. She was a gypsy from the get-go. Her life would be in a dance studio. MacLaine is very eloquent about her "gypsy" background (and for those of you who don't know - "gypsy" refers to the kids who sing and dance and make up the chorus lines in every musical ever made ... They are ready to go on at a moment's notice, they take dance classes all week, they audition, they go from job to job ... and nobody in the business has the reputation that a true "gypsy" has. Chorus Line is all about that. It's not about being a star. It's about fitting in to that chorus line. Easier said than done. Gypsies have the best discipline of anyone in the business.) MacLaine never fell off the tracks, in terms of her lifestyle, or her fame. Her gypsy roots is what she attributes that to. Well, that and being raised well.

MacLaine moved to New York as a teenager and began making the rounds. She got some jobs as a sort of hostess - You know, new refrigerators would be on display in some conference center, and they would hire pretty girls to stand by the appliances and greet customers and show off the new features. MacLaine found herself traveling around by train with a bunch of crazy hard-drinking refrigerator salesmen. She has said, "I was the only virgin on that train." But soon she started getting dancing jobs. Her big break was getting a job in the chorus line of Pajama Game in 1954.

It was a big deal for many reasons: One, it was partly choreographed by Bob Fosse. MacLaine ended up (later) being one of the few dancers who could really master his asymmetrical S-curve twisted-sexuality type of dancing. It is not easy, and you see lots of Fosse-Lite on Broadway right now, and dammit, it is not the same thing. Watch Ann Reinking in All That Jazz, watch Liza in her concert Liza with a Z (choreographed by Fosse) - and you can see what it's supposed to look like.

MacLaine ended up forging a great and lifelong relationship with Fosse. Second of all, this was the first moment where MacLaine was given some things to do - outside of the chorus. Nothing big ... but lines, bits ... George Abbott and Jerome Robbins directed, and the producer was Hal Prince. These are giants.

MacLaine was only in the chorus. But she also understudied Carol Haney's part.

What happened to MacLaine has now passed into theatrical legend. It is the primary dream of every understudy to have something happen to her like happened to MacLaine. In a way, it is unprecedented. MacLaine jokes that the reason she believes in destiny so much is because of what happened to her during Pajama Game. Makes a lot of sense. You couldn't ask for a more perfect situation. And it wasn't just that MacLaine had a good night ... it's that she had a good night and someone important HAPPENED to be in the audience that night. And not only that night - but the random night a couple months later when MacLaine went on again - someone big was in the audience AGAIN. Extraordinary. Oh - and she hadn't even had had a rehearsal, people. She understudied Carol Haney's part on paper, but there wasn't an understudy rehearsal ... so she learned the part from peeking out of the wings at Haney doing it. Unbelievable.

One of the greatest stories in American theatre.

So that's the excerpt from MacLaine's lovely book that I chose. (Oh, and below the jump - see the Playbill from that original production in 1954. You can see MacLaine's name listed on the Understudy page, in tiny print ... and I also like the air raid warning at the top of the main cast list.)

And watch how she thinks on her feet in the excerpt below ... realizing she needed to slow down, to give the audience a chance to laugh. To be able to continue to think in the midst of a high-pressure situation ... is the mark of a true pro.

EXCERPT FROM Don't Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

On May 9, 1954, The Pajama Game opened in New York to rave reviews both for the show and for Carol. She had been a choreographer's assistant for years, but now the public thronged to the stage door, clamoring for a glimpse of the brilliant performer they had discovered "overnight". She was singled out as the musical-comedy find of the decade.

It looked very much as though I, on the other hand, would be chorus girl of the century. Four nights passed. I still hadn't had an understudy rehearsal, but whenever I wasn't onstage I watched Carol from the wings, trying to learn the part even though I doubted I would ever need to know it. Only four days after the opening and already I was deeply depressed. I was in another hit! More weekly paychecks, enervating security, and monotony.

After the first Wednesday matinee I went back to the apartment to fix dinner for Steve. Whil we were eating I had a phone call from one of the producers of Can-Can, which had been running about two years. He offered me a job as understudy to his lead dancer.

"We know you must realize," he said, "that nothing will ever keep Haney from going on in Pajama Game, and our girl is out every now and then."

I asked him to let me think it over.

While we finished eating, I discussed it with Steve, who felt that if being in another long run was more than I could take, then I should leave Pajama Game immediately. I agreed, and before leaving for the theater I wrote my notice, intending to turn it in that night. Running late, I rushed for the subway and would have done better walking. The train got stuck in its tunnel, and I arrived at the theater panting, late by half an hour.

Hal Prince and his co-producer, the late Bobby Griffith, were pacing the sidewalk at the stagedoor entrance, wringing their hands.

"Where have you been?" they asked.

"Gee, I'm awfully sorry. The subway got stuck, but I'll hurry. Anyway I don't go on till the middle of the first act."

"That's what you think! HANEY BROKE HER ANKLE THIS AFTERNOON AND YOU'RE ON RIGHT NOW!"

I was carrying my notice in my hand. I stuffed it back into my purse. The world spun around four times - one for each time I had watched Carol do the part. A horrible thought jumped into my mind and kept running: I know I'll drop the derby in "Steam Heat", I know I'll drop the derby in "Steam Heat".

"Steam Heat" opened the second act and it was the show stopper - a song-and-dance number for a trio of two men and a girl. The routine called for a derby to be tumbled, thrown, spun, and juggled throughout the number.

They hustled me to Carol's dressing room. I asked someone to call Steve. I shook so hard that someone else had to put the makeup on my face. (I was sure to drop the derby.) A wardrobe woman zipped up my first-act costume and it fitted. Relief. Then came the shoes. Disaster. Her size four wasn't even big enough for my big toe. I rushed to the basement where I always dressed and found a pair of my own black tennis shoes. They didn't go with the costume, but if the audience was looking at my feet I was in big trouble anyway.

Above me I heard the audience stamping, impatient because the curtain hadn't gone up.

John Raitt, the leading man, was learning the words to my songs in case I forgot them, and Eddie Foy, Jr., one of the co-leads, was so nervous that he was throwing up in his dressing room.

I raced up and waited in the wings as the stage manager walked out before the curtain and gestured for attention.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Te management regrets to announce that Miss Carol Haney will not be performing tonight. Her role will be performed by a young lady named Shirley MacLaine. We hope you will enjoy the show."

His last words were drowned out as the audience set up a terrific boo. Many people rose and made straight for the box office to get their money back. Chaos. Hal Hastings, the conductor, stared up from the pit, a shaken man. He had no idea what key I sang in, or even if I sang at all, but resolutely he raised his baton. The musicians straightened in their chairs, and on cue they struck up the overture to try to drown out the hubbub that was still coming from the audience.

In the middle of the overture, Steve rushed in, and for a moment he just stood there, looking like a zombie.

He reached for my hand. "This should teach you patience," he said. "And remember - most people don't get this break in a whole lifetime, so, for everybody who waits, make the most of it."

Then, muttering the actors' good luck, "Merde," he pat-patted me on the fanny and went out to join the audience. His napkin from dinner was trailing from the pocket of his jacket.

The overture ended. I had to go to the bathroom so badly I was afraid to walk.

The curtain went up.

Taking a deep breath, I made it safely to center stage. From the corner of my eye I could see the cast lined up in the wings, watching. A hush came over the audience. They seemed to understand how I felt. The most important people in show business were out there. They had come to see Carol Haney, but I was onstage instead. I took another breath and spoke the first line. My high, raucous voice blasted in the ears. The line was supposed to get a laugh. It didn't. Just as I began the second speech, they laughed at the first one. I hadn't waited long enough, hadn't given them time. Just because I was ready didn't mean they were. I slowed the tempo of my delivery and soon we were on the same beat. I felt them relax, en masse, and I did too. There is nothing worse than an audience that's afraid for a performer. Suddenly the flow of communication that I had longed for all my life was there. It wasn't the applause and laughter that fulfilled me; it was the magnetism, the current, moving from one human being to the others and back again, like a giant pendulum. I was in time with the audience, no longer at odds with it.

John Raitt sang "Hernando's Hideaway" for me, and I remember how strange Carol's song sounded in someone else's voice. For weeks I had been hearing the lines and songs in her voice, and now it took a combined effort to accomplish what she had done alone.

Then came the opening of the second act and "Steam Heat". Carol's black tuxedo fitted me and even the derby, custom-made for her head, was fine.

The muted trumpet sounded in the orchestra pit as the curtain opened on the number that had already become a classic in musical comedy. The three of us held our opening positions until the applause of recognition had died down. I held my breath, feeling the weight and texture of the derby on my head, wanting to practice juggle the opening trick one more time.

In unison we danced our way to the footlights, threw our derbies into the air, and caught them simultaneously. The audience clapped again. Maybe I would get through it after all. The trumpet led the orchestra to a crescendo in a swinging wail and the theatre seemed to rock. Each trick went perfectly. Then the music stopped: time for the piece de resistance. We would execute it in silence.

Our backs were to the audience. In unison, we rolled the derbies from our heads, spilled them down our arms, flipped them high into the air and caught them at the last moment before the audience could figure out how it was done. Then it happened. I dropped my derby. There was a gasp from the audience. The derby crashed to the stage and rolled to the edge of the orchestra pit, where it mercifully decided not to fall in. Because my back was to the audience and because I just didn't realize that I wasn't in the chorus any more, I didn't think about controlling my reaction.

"Shit!" I muttered to myself, thinking that only the other two dancers could hear it.

The first three rows gasped again, and the word spread through the theater. Well ... I thought. I come all this way, wait all this time, and now ... what a way to end!

I rushed to the footlights, picked up the derby, put it on, shrugged a sort of apology to the audience, and finished the number. I remember little else. I can't remember whether or not they clapped after the routine, and I barely remember the rest of the second act.

The curtain rang down on the show and then up again for curtain calls.

The audience stood. They cheered - and threw kisses. I felt as though a giant caress had enveloped me. The cast backed off, formed a semi-circle around me,m and applauded.

I stood there alone, wearing the black-and-white convict-striped pajama jacket that matched Eddie Foy's convict pants. I reached out, beckoning the cast to close in around me and share the applause, but they only backed off more and left me in the center to bask. I was overwhelmed with loneliness. When you've trained as a ballet dancer you are trained to be part of a team. You devote your talent to being a link that makes up the chain. You don't think in terms of being different or special. The desire lurks underneath, but you continually suppress it. And so with the night I went on in Pajama Game everything changed. I was out in front of the chain and I felt lonely, and yet at the same time I felt so much that I belonged. The curtain rang up and down to prolonged applause. I knew I could step out of the line and be myself any time I wanted to now, I belonged to myself and from then on I would have to devote all of me to developing that self the best way I knew how. No more blacked-out front teeth and Servel ice makers. Everything had changed. A higher level of hard work, toil, and struggle was necessary now. Talent was nothing but sweat.

I returned to my dressing room to collapse. Steve was waiting. "We have a lot of work to do," he said. "Your drunk scene in the second act was phony, so the first thing is to take you out and get you drunk. Then you'll know what it's all about." Smiling, he wiped the perspiration from my face. "By the way - you were great."

"Was I really?"

"To them, yes. But you still have a long way to go."

"Thanks," I muttered, resenting him for not letting me rest on my laurels.

"By the way, that 'shit' was very quaint. I guess you can take the girl out of the chorus, but you can't take the chorus out of the girl. I've just talked to Hal Prince. Haney will be out for three weeks. Now let's go get drunk."

The second night I was on for Carol I met another man who helped change the course of my life. Although I didn't know it then, eventually I would have to fight him in court as well as in arenas that had nothing to do with the judiciary. The words he spoke were the words every young American female supposedly longs to hear.

"Miss MacLaine," he said, "my name is Hal Wallis, and I'm prepared to offer you a movie contract. In Hollywood."

He had come backstage after the show and was waiting for me when I emerged from the dressing room.

Hal Wallis ...

What I saw was a well-dressed man of clearly more than average prosperity, slightly hunched, with cagy, calculating eyes, and a face like a suntanned pear. I knew the name; I knew he was a big producer. But I couldn't bring myself to swoon.

"Aren't you the one who makes all those movies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis?" I asked.

"Yes. I discovered them, too."

"Too?"

"Yes. I just discovered you. I was in the audience tonight."

"You mean you want me to be one of those girls who run up and down the stairs in a yellow sunsuit?"

"Does some other color sunsuit - ah - suit you better?"

It was only a first taste of what was to come.

At Wallis's suggestion, Steve and I met him later. I was wearing my blue jeans, which matched Steve's and we met him at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel to discuss his proposal.

The headwaiter, doubtless alerted for this or a similar breach, let us and our blue jeans in, and steered us toward a table in the corner, where Wallis, swallowing his concern for appearances and flashing a jaundiced grin, rose to greet us.

After drinks we had soup, salad, thick juicy steaks, baked potatoes, and Cherries Jubilee. But Wallis was content to nibble on Ry-Krisp, and as the conversation progressed, I understood why. He had a very special feeling for his forty-odd million. He couldn't bear to part with a dime of it.

What he was offering me was a seven-year contract with loan-out privileges - most of the privileges being his. After scooping up the last of the Cherries Jubilee, Steve and I decided it would be best to let the offer hang until we could find an agent to represent me. We also wanted to see if there would be other offers.

We thanked Wallis for the dinner and went up to the apartment to work on my drunk scene.

It doesn't take theatrical agents long to smell where the new flesh is. Waiting on my doorstep were men from three different agencies. If I'd tried to see the same men in their offices a week earlier, Id never have gotten beyond the elevator. Watching Steve handle them, I wondered how I, or any young girl, could ever have coped with all this alone. I relied on him for everything.

While continuing to stave off Wallis, with Steve's help I concentrated on improving my performance in The Pajama Game. Every night after the show, Steve rehearsed me, bringing in some of his director friends for their advice and criticism. He also found me a reliable agent, one who was not part of an all-consuming corporation, and he saw to it that representatives of every major Hollywood studio came to watch my performance.

They came and they watched, and I wondered why they even bothered. When they talked to me, I found they were interested in only two things:

1. What were my measurements?
2. Would I pose for cheesecake?

Not one of them made me a concrete offer. That left only Wallis, the man with the nose of a bloodhound.

I asked Hal Prince for his advice. "Don't go to Hollywood now," he said. "You don't have enough experience. Stay on Broadway and do a few more shows first."

"In the chorus?"

"It doesn't matter. Go to Hollywood now and you'll never be heard from again."

My new agent worked out a deal slightly different from the contract Wallis had offered, one that would bind me only five years instead of seven.

I signed with Wallis.

Hal Prince lamented: "You'll be sorry."

Carol Haney returned to the show; I went back to the chorus and waited for Hal Wallis to call me to Hollywood.

Two months later Carol came down with a terrible case of laryngitis and was unable to speak. Once again I went on for her, and once again there was someone special in the audience - this time a representative of Alfred Hitchcock.

He came to my dressing room after the show. "Mr. Hitchcock is looking for a suitably fey creature to play the lead in his next picture, The Trouble With Harry," he said. "I think you will do just fine."

"Me? But I already have a contract with Hal Wallis," I wailed.

"Mr. Hitchcock knows that. He would like you to meet him in his suite at the St. Regis tomorrow. If he likes you, he can work something out with Wallis."

The Books: "Don't Fall Off the Mountain" (Shirley MacLaine)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Don't Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

I wonder if Shirley MacLaine is bad at anything. I'm sure she is - and so she doesn't spend her energies in those areas ... or who knows. Maybe she just works her ass off (I know that is true ... this woman works. It's her dance training. Those people have discipline, man. You could be decapitated and still not miss a dance class.) She's written a ton of books - some new age ones, and others autobiographies - and they're fantastic. She's a writer, too. Not just chattering about her life to a ghost writer and having an editor whip it into shape ... She IS a writer. She talks about her writing process (when she "feels" the muse, and when she doesn't, where she needs to be, what her office needs to be like - all very writer-ish concerns - She knows it isn't EASY - unlike some people who say what are possibly the most insulting words in the history of the English language: "I could write a great book if I only had the time." Uh-huh. So the only difference between you and, say, Hemingway, is HE HAD THE TIME?) MacLaine knows writing is a craft, like any other, so she works at it. MacLaine has said that even in childhood, spending so much time at the dance studio, she also knew she was a writer. Anyway, this is just to say I adore her books. Sometimes they're a bit kooky for me - but they are ALWAYS sincere. They represent a woman who has truly been on a journey ... of self-discovery, and questions, and curiosity ... Compare this to the condescending tone of Ms. Paltrow's GOOP ("My life is great because I'm not passive") ... and you will see such a difference. MacLaine has none of that snotty "I'm more enlightened" thing going on. Maybe she does now, but hell, the woman is 300 years old. I hope I can be a little bit snotty at age 300 about what I feel I have learned. What I like about her stuff is that she is honest. She doesn't come off as perfect or enlightened in her books. She comes off as ... human. Making mistakes, hurting people by accident, having to make amends ... looking back on some of her choices with regrets ... trying to be okay with who she was when she was younger ... It's my type of memoir. (And I'm lucky because she's written, what, 26 memoirs??)

Her stories about her childhood (you know, with her younger brother, Warren freakin' Beatty) are very touching. She sensed, very early on, that her mother had a lot of thwarted dreams and so she poured all of that unexpressed creativity into her children - and when they became famous (and MacLaine always felt that the two of them HAD to become famous, in order to fulfill their parents' dreams for them) ... it was as though their parents were living THROUGH them. On her death bed, Shirley's mother expressed to Shirley her envy ... that Shirley was living the life SHE wanted to have lived ... and in a strange way, it was a relief for MacLaine to hear that ... because she had always sensed it. Her parents sound like wonderful people.

MacLaine was a dancer. That was her training. She had weak ankles, which was a big problem for her ... but she learned to work around it. She was a gypsy from the get-go. Her life would be in a dance studio. MacLaine is very eloquent about her "gypsy" background (and for those of you who don't know - "gypsy" refers to the kids who sing and dance and make up the chorus lines in every musical ever made ... They are ready to go on at a moment's notice, they take dance classes all week, they audition, they go from job to job ... and nobody in the business has the reputation that a true "gypsy" has. Chorus Line is all about that. It's not about being a star. It's about fitting in to that chorus line. Easier said than done. Gypsies have the best discipline of anyone in the business.) MacLaine never fell off the tracks, in terms of her lifestyle, or her fame. Her gypsy roots is what she attributes that to. Well, that and being raised well.

MacLaine moved to New York as a teenager and began making the rounds. She got some jobs as a sort of hostess - You know, new refrigerators would be on display in some conference center, and they would hire pretty girls to stand by the appliances and greet customers and show off the new features. MacLaine found herself traveling around by train with a bunch of crazy hard-drinking refrigerator salesmen. She has said, "I was the only virgin on that train." But soon she started getting dancing jobs. Her big break was getting a job in the chorus line of Pajama Game in 1954.

It was a big deal for many reasons: One, it was partly choreographed by Bob Fosse. MacLaine ended up (later) being one of the few dancers who could really master his asymmetrical S-curve twisted-sexuality type of dancing. It is not easy, and you see lots of Fosse-Lite on Broadway right now, and dammit, it is not the same thing. Watch Ann Reinking in All That Jazz, watch Liza in her concert Liza with a Z (choreographed by Fosse) - and you can see what it's supposed to look like.

MacLaine ended up forging a great and lifelong relationship with Fosse. Second of all, this was the first moment where MacLaine was given some things to do - outside of the chorus. Nothing big ... but lines, bits ... George Abbott and Jerome Robbins directed, and the producer was Hal Prince. These are giants.

MacLaine was only in the chorus. But she also understudied Carol Haney's part.

What happened to MacLaine has now passed into theatrical legend. It is the primary dream of every understudy to have something happen to her like happened to MacLaine. In a way, it is unprecedented. MacLaine jokes that the reason she believes in destiny so much is because of what happened to her during Pajama Game. Makes a lot of sense. You couldn't ask for a more perfect situation. And it wasn't just that MacLaine had a good night ... it's that she had a good night and someone important HAPPENED to be in the audience that night. And not only that night - but the random night a couple months later when MacLaine went on again - someone big was in the audience AGAIN. Extraordinary. Oh - and she hadn't even had had a rehearsal, people. She understudied Carol Haney's part on paper, but there wasn't an understudy rehearsal ... so she learned the part from peeking out of the wings at Haney doing it. Unbelievable.

One of the greatest stories in American theatre.

So that's the excerpt from MacLaine's lovely book that I chose. (Oh, and below the jump - see the Playbill from that original production in 1954. You can see MacLaine's name listed on the Understudy page, in tiny print ... and I also like the air raid warning at the top of the main cast list.)

And watch how she thinks on her feet in the excerpt below ... realizing she needed to slow down, to give the audience a chance to laugh. To be able to continue to think in the midst of a high-pressure situation ... is the mark of a true pro.

EXCERPT FROM Don't Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

On May 9, 1954, The Pajama Game opened in New York to rave reviews both for the show and for Carol. She had been a choreographer's assistant for years, but now the public thronged to the stage door, clamoring for a glimpse of the brilliant performer they had discovered "overnight". She was singled out as the musical-comedy find of the decade.

It looked very much as though I, on the other hand, would be chorus girl of the century. Four nights passed. I still hadn't had an understudy rehearsal, but whenever I wasn't onstage I watched Carol from the wings, trying to learn the part even though I doubted I would ever need to know it. Only four days after the opening and already I was deeply depressed. I was in another hit! More weekly paychecks, enervating security, and monotony.

After the first Wednesday matinee I went back to the apartment to fix dinner for Steve. Whil we were eating I had a phone call from one of the producers of Can-Can, which had been running about two years. He offered me a job as understudy to his lead dancer.

"We know you must realize," he said, "that nothing will ever keep Haney from going on in Pajama Game, and our girl is out every now and then."

I asked him to let me think it over.

While we finished eating, I discussed it with Steve, who felt that if being in another long run was more than I could take, then I should leave Pajama Game immediately. I agreed, and before leaving for the theater I wrote my notice, intending to turn it in that night. Running late, I rushed for the subway and would have done better walking. The train got stuck in its tunnel, and I arrived at the theater panting, late by half an hour.

Hal Prince and his co-producer, the late Bobby Griffith, were pacing the sidewalk at the stagedoor entrance, wringing their hands.

"Where have you been?" they asked.

"Gee, I'm awfully sorry. The subway got stuck, but I'll hurry. Anyway I don't go on till the middle of the first act."

"That's what you think! HANEY BROKE HER ANKLE THIS AFTERNOON AND YOU'RE ON RIGHT NOW!"

I was carrying my notice in my hand. I stuffed it back into my purse. The world spun around four times - one for each time I had watched Carol do the part. A horrible thought jumped into my mind and kept running: I know I'll drop the derby in "Steam Heat", I know I'll drop the derby in "Steam Heat".

"Steam Heat" opened the second act and it was the show stopper - a song-and-dance number for a trio of two men and a girl. The routine called for a derby to be tumbled, thrown, spun, and juggled throughout the number.

They hustled me to Carol's dressing room. I asked someone to call Steve. I shook so hard that someone else had to put the makeup on my face. (I was sure to drop the derby.) A wardrobe woman zipped up my first-act costume and it fitted. Relief. Then came the shoes. Disaster. Her size four wasn't even big enough for my big toe. I rushed to the basement where I always dressed and found a pair of my own black tennis shoes. They didn't go with the costume, but if the audience was looking at my feet I was in big trouble anyway.

Above me I heard the audience stamping, impatient because the curtain hadn't gone up.

John Raitt, the leading man, was learning the words to my songs in case I forgot them, and Eddie Foy, Jr., one of the co-leads, was so nervous that he was throwing up in his dressing room.

I raced up and waited in the wings as the stage manager walked out before the curtain and gestured for attention.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Te management regrets to announce that Miss Carol Haney will not be performing tonight. Her role will be performed by a young lady named Shirley MacLaine. We hope you will enjoy the show."

His last words were drowned out as the audience set up a terrific boo. Many people rose and made straight for the box office to get their money back. Chaos. Hal Hastings, the conductor, stared up from the pit, a shaken man. He had no idea what key I sang in, or even if I sang at all, but resolutely he raised his baton. The musicians straightened in their chairs, and on cue they struck up the overture to try to drown out the hubbub that was still coming from the audience.

In the middle of the overture, Steve rushed in, and for a moment he just stood there, looking like a zombie.

He reached for my hand. "This should teach you patience," he said. "And remember - most people don't get this break in a whole lifetime, so, for everybody who waits, make the most of it."

Then, muttering the actors' good luck, "Merde," he pat-patted me on the fanny and went out to join the audience. His napkin from dinner was trailing from the pocket of his jacket.

The overture ended. I had to go to the bathroom so badly I was afraid to walk.

The curtain went up.

Taking a deep breath, I made it safely to center stage. From the corner of my eye I could see the cast lined up in the wings, watching. A hush came over the audience. They seemed to understand how I felt. The most important people in show business were out there. They had come to see Carol Haney, but I was onstage instead. I took another breath and spoke the first line. My high, raucous voice blasted in the ears. The line was supposed to get a laugh. It didn't. Just as I began the second speech, they laughed at the first one. I hadn't waited long enough, hadn't given them time. Just because I was ready didn't mean they were. I slowed the tempo of my delivery and soon we were on the same beat. I felt them relax, en masse, and I did too. There is nothing worse than an audience that's afraid for a performer. Suddenly the flow of communication that I had longed for all my life was there. It wasn't the applause and laughter that fulfilled me; it was the magnetism, the current, moving from one human being to the others and back again, like a giant pendulum. I was in time with the audience, no longer at odds with it.

John Raitt sang "Hernando's Hideaway" for me, and I remember how strange Carol's song sounded in someone else's voice. For weeks I had been hearing the lines and songs in her voice, and now it took a combined effort to accomplish what she had done alone.

Then came the opening of the second act and "Steam Heat". Carol's black tuxedo fitted me and even the derby, custom-made for her head, was fine.

The muted trumpet sounded in the orchestra pit as the curtain opened on the number that had already become a classic in musical comedy. The three of us held our opening positions until the applause of recognition had died down. I held my breath, feeling the weight and texture of the derby on my head, wanting to practice juggle the opening trick one more time.

In unison we danced our way to the footlights, threw our derbies into the air, and caught them simultaneously. The audience clapped again. Maybe I would get through it after all. The trumpet led the orchestra to a crescendo in a swinging wail and the theatre seemed to rock. Each trick went perfectly. Then the music stopped: time for the piece de resistance. We would execute it in silence.

Our backs were to the audience. In unison, we rolled the derbies from our heads, spilled them down our arms, flipped them high into the air and caught them at the last moment before the audience could figure out how it was done. Then it happened. I dropped my derby. There was a gasp from the audience. The derby crashed to the stage and rolled to the edge of the orchestra pit, where it mercifully decided not to fall in. Because my back was to the audience and because I just didn't realize that I wasn't in the chorus any more, I didn't think about controlling my reaction.

"Shit!" I muttered to myself, thinking that only the other two dancers could hear it.

The first three rows gasped again, and the word spread through the theater. Well ... I thought. I come all this way, wait all this time, and now ... what a way to end!

I rushed to the footlights, picked up the derby, put it on, shrugged a sort of apology to the audience, and finished the number. I remember little else. I can't remember whether or not they clapped after the routine, and I barely remember the rest of the second act.

The curtain rang down on the show and then up again for curtain calls.

The audience stood. They cheered - and threw kisses. I felt as though a giant caress had enveloped me. The cast backed off, formed a semi-circle around me,m and applauded.

I stood there alone, wearing the black-and-white convict-striped pajama jacket that matched Eddie Foy's convict pants. I reached out, beckoning the cast to close in around me and share the applause, but they only backed off more and left me in the center to bask. I was overwhelmed with loneliness. When you've trained as a ballet dancer you are trained to be part of a team. You devote your talent to being a link that makes up the chain. You don't think in terms of being different or special. The desire lurks underneath, but you continually suppress it. And so with the night I went on in Pajama Game everything changed. I was out in front of the chain and I felt lonely, and yet at the same time I felt so much that I belonged. The curtain rang up and down to prolonged applause. I knew I could step out of the line and be myself any time I wanted to now, I belonged to myself and from then on I would have to devote all of me to developing that self the best way I knew how. No more blacked-out front teeth and Servel ice makers. Everything had changed. A higher level of hard work, toil, and struggle was necessary now. Talent was nothing but sweat.

I returned to my dressing room to collapse. Steve was waiting. "We have a lot of work to do," he said. "Your drunk scene in the second act was phony, so the first thing is to take you out and get you drunk. Then you'll know what it's all about." Smiling, he wiped the perspiration from my face. "By the way - you were great."

"Was I really?"

"To them, yes. But you still have a long way to go."

"Thanks," I muttered, resenting him for not letting me rest on my laurels.

"By the way, that 'shit' was very quaint. I guess you can take the girl out of the chorus, but you can't take the chorus out of the girl. I've just talked to Hal Prince. Haney will be out for three weeks. Now let's go get drunk."

The second night I was on for Carol I met another man who helped change the course of my life. Although I didn't know it then, eventually I would have to fight him in court as well as in arenas that had nothing to do with the judiciary. The words he spoke were the words every young American female supposedly longs to hear.

"Miss MacLaine," he said, "my name is Hal Wallis, and I'm prepared to offer you a movie contract. In Hollywood."

He had come backstage after the show and was waiting for me when I emerged from the dressing room.

Hal Wallis ...

What I saw was a well-dressed man of clearly more than average prosperity, slightly hunched, with cagy, calculating eyes, and a face like a suntanned pear. I knew the name; I knew he was a big producer. But I couldn't bring myself to swoon.

"Aren't you the one who makes all those movies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis?" I asked.

"Yes. I discovered them, too."

"Too?"

"Yes. I just discovered you. I was in the audience tonight."

"You mean you want me to be one of those girls who run up and down the stairs in a yellow sunsuit?"

"Does some other color sunsuit - ah - suit you better?"

It was only a first taste of what was to come.

At Wallis's suggestion, Steve and I met him later. I was wearing my blue jeans, which matched Steve's and we met him at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel to discuss his proposal.

The headwaiter, doubtless alerted for this or a similar breach, let us and our blue jeans in, and steered us toward a table in the corner, where Wallis, swallowing his concern for appearances and flashing a jaundiced grin, rose to greet us.

After drinks we had soup, salad, thick juicy steaks, baked potatoes, and Cherries Jubilee. But Wallis was content to nibble on Ry-Krisp, and as the conversation progressed, I understood why. He had a very special feeling for his forty-odd million. He couldn't bear to part with a dime of it.

What he was offering me was a seven-year contract with loan-out privileges - most of the privileges being his. After scooping up the last of the Cherries Jubilee, Steve and I decided it would be best to let the offer hang until we could find an agent to represent me. We also wanted to see if there would be other offers.

We thanked Wallis for the dinner and went up to the apartment to work on my drunk scene.

It doesn't take theatrical agents long to smell where the new flesh is. Waiting on my doorstep were men from three different agencies. If I'd tried to see the same men in their offices a week earlier, Id never have gotten beyond the elevator. Watching Steve handle them, I wondered how I, or any young girl, could ever have coped with all this alone. I relied on him for everything.

While continuing to stave off Wallis, with Steve's help I concentrated on improving my performance in The Pajama Game. Every night after the show, Steve rehearsed me, bringing in some of his director friends for their advice and criticism. He also found me a reliable agent, one who was not part of an all-consuming corporation, and he saw to it that representatives of every major Hollywood studio came to watch my performance.

They came and they watched, and I wondered why they even bothered. When they talked to me, I found they were interested in only two things:

1. What were my measurements?
2. Would I pose for cheesecake?

Not one of them made me a concrete offer. That left only Wallis, the man with the nose of a bloodhound.

I asked Hal Prince for his advice. "Don't go to Hollywood now," he said. "You don't have enough experience. Stay on Broadway and do a few more shows first."

"In the chorus?"

"It doesn't matter. Go to Hollywood now and you'll never be heard from again."

My new agent worked out a deal slightly different from the contract Wallis had offered, one that would bind me only five years instead of seven.

I signed with Wallis.

Hal Prince lamented: "You'll be sorry."

Carol Haney returned to the show; I went back to the chorus and waited for Hal Wallis to call me to Hollywood.

Two months later Carol came down with a terrible case of laryngitis and was unable to speak. Once again I went on for her, and once again there was someone special in the audience - this time a representative of Alfred Hitchcock.

He came to my dressing room after the show. "Mr. Hitchcock is looking for a suitably fey creature to play the lead in his next picture, The Trouble With Harry," he said. "I think you will do just fine."

"Me? But I already have a contract with Hal Wallis," I wailed.

"Mr. Hitchcock knows that. He would like you to meet him in his suite at the St. Regis tomorrow. If he likes you, he can work something out with Wallis."

The Books: "Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh" (Alexander Walker)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, by Alexander Walker

I had seen Gone with the Wind as a kid, and while it's not my favorite movie, it certainly made an impression. One of the things I remember (at least in terms of my response to the film - so we're talking about me as a 10 year old, probably) is that I got so frustrated and hurt FOR Scarlett that Rhett wouldn't take her at her word. That he was so skeptical of her sincerity. Especially the scene when she was crying about Melanie on her deathbed - and she tries to comfort Ashley - and Rhett, naturally, puts a cynical spin on her actions. As a grown woman, I can now see Rhett's point ... but as a kid, I wanted to scream at Rhett, "BELIEVE HER. She really DID love Melanie and she really IS comforting Ashley!" So I guess the movie did get affect me, to some degree. It's enjoyable, and there are some moments that rival the best moments in any movie ever (the long shot of the road filled with Civil War dead and dying, the burning of Atlanta, the hospital scene) - but as you can see, I think the best parts of this film are the larger epic moments ... historical moments. The soap opera tangled-web relationships part of the movie just doesn't do it for me. The plot feels bossy - one of those plots that cannot leave well enough alone and has to keep cackling to itself, "Let me throw THIS at the characters and see how they handle it!" I can understand its stature in American movies - it's just that I personally am not in love with it. I think the story of the MAKING of the movie is better than the movie itself (how many directors did the damn thing have?? - not to mention the "discovery" of its young star - Vivien Leigh).

Of course it was only a couple of years later (in my life) when I saw East of Eden and everything changed, in terms of my perspective (story at 11) - and naturally I saw Streetcar Named Desire as often as I possibly could. Thank God for late-night television and channel 56. That movie was so real I could smell Stanley's sweat, and the suffocating stink of overblown flowers, and garbage, and rain water. To think that that was the same actress who flounced around unconsciously (and annoyingly, to me) in Gone with the Wind was hard to get my head around. What had happened to her?

Many people said that the film Streetcar was superior to the original stage production (which starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche) ... and I think some of that did have to do with Leigh's powerful interpretation of the role (which she had also played on stage). Or ... interpretation might be too intellectual a word. She wasn't natural in the part, the way Brando was in his ... It was almost like she flitted about nervously on the surface of the part, hoping to avoid the revelations therein, and Blanche's inevitable end ... and I think that is actually a perfect way to go about Blanche - the woman who is so insistent on NOT remembering certain things, that she snaps ... Life itself is too treacherous for this woman to survive it ... not because she is fragile, necessarily ... but because she is sensitive. The world is not kind to its most sensitive members. I didn't know how close the role of Blanche was to Vivien Leigh - I didn't know of her own mental instability, her terror of growing old, her endurance of ECT treatments, her fear of losing her womanliness ... but she was able, with Kazan's great help, to tap into all of that in her portrayal. Pretty amazing.

I still think it's hard to look at anybody else other than Brando in that film. Roger Ebert has written about the delicate moment when Brando picks up a piece of fluff, in the middle of a scene. To compare that with his brutish manners and overall boarishness is to see a true genius at work - someone who didn't say "No" to any of his impulses. Unfortunately, I see a lot of actors who have played Stanely - say "no" to things that they do not consider to be "Stanley-ish". In other words: they judge the character, they condescend (they don't know that that's what they are doing - but oh yes, they are - they consciously LIMIT Stanely, by saying, "Oh, Stanley wouldn't do that ..." Brando did whatever the hell he felt like doing, including noticing a tiny bit of fluff and plucking it off a sweater with almost a crook-ed pinkie - an elegant careful gesture ... No limits on Stanley.) So you know. Who can compete? Everyone is good in that film, particularly Karl Malden ... but Vivien Leigh burns with a nervous brightness that at times is unbearable to watch. You want to just put her in bed, and gently rub her forehead, telling her that everything is going to be okay. Even in her "gay" moments, there is fear flicking at her heels ... and Leigh portrays that brilliantly. It's not that it doesn't seem like it's acting ... it DOES seem like it's acting - but that is perfect for the role as well.

Alexander Walker's book focuses mainly on the marriage between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh - an oftentimes stormy yet long-lasting deep relationship. They were clearly in love, and Leigh (always a bit of a fantasist - which created many of her problems later in life) had dreams of she and Olivier being considered the new "Lunt-Fontaine". Things didn't quite work out that way, and Walker documents the various breakdowns and miscarriages and problems in the marriage to such a degree that I actually found it boring. Life is more than marriage. But perhaps for Leigh she found it difficult to balance her marriage with her ambitions ... especially because she was married to a man generally considered the greatest damn actor alive! Not that her star needed shining ... she was a superstar forevermore from her performance as Scarlett O'Hara ... but she was not a satisfied person. In many ways, there is some truth to that "queer divine dissatisfaction" phrase from Martha Graham's famous letter to Agnes DeMille:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not yours to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is ever pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

After years of dissatisfaction myself, I am not sure I can say what the hell is so "divine" about it, Martha, although I would concede that it is "queer", and my unrest could barely be referred to as "blessed" - but REGARDLESS. There is much in that famous oft-quoted (TOO OFTEN) paragraph that rings true. I thought of it this morning when I was getting ready to write this post, and thinking about Vivien Leigh and her journey. She had great good fortune. Much of what happened to her was right place-right time kind of stuff, although she did have powerful peopl in her corner from the beginning. She also knew what she had to work on as an actress, and set herself the task of working on it. Her great good fortune did not make her lazy. But within her, there was an eternal feeling of "queer divine dissatisfaction" - which ended up gnawing away at her, leaving her a shell of a woman by the end. At least that is the portrait painted in this biography. You wonder what it is that makes her so frightened. And yet I really relate to her in many ways, especially in her fears of growing older and being forgotten. She was so beautiful it took people's breaths away ... yet she wanted to be known as more than just a pretty face. Yet when she began to grow older, she really started to lose her mind, and needed incessant reassurance she was still beautiful. It is thought she had bipolar disorder, and she also was very ill a lot of the time - with tuberculosis - which caused her to be laid low for months at a time. It was a turbulent existence.

But for quite some time, she and Olivier were the premiere cosmopolitan actor-y couple in the world, living it up for the camera, onscreen and off. They were fish-out-of-water in Hollywood (although there was a huge British" colony there) - and there are great stories of the two of them, early on, doing movies for the first time, trying to reconcile their stagecraft with what was needed for the medium of the movies.

(I love love love that photo.)

The impression I am left with, from Walker's book, is an unfortunate one. She comes off as spoiled, impossible, headstrong (not always in a good way) and mentally ill. I wanted to choose an excerpt that highlighted her strengths, rather than her weaknesses (because I'm all about that ... what are good at?? I also love moments of "first success" in someone's life) - so I chose an excerpt from her first big play in London, a costume drama called The Mask of Virtue. This was pre-Hollywood, pre- GoneWith the Wind, pre-Olivier, pre Korda ... The Mask of Virtue was the vehicle - even more so than Gone with the Wind that ended up making stardom possible. Because without Mask of Virtue, there would have been no Hollywood, no GWTW. Leigh was young and full of ambition ... yet she was cast mainly because she looked right, and the costumes would just highlight her beauty. It was a star part: a double-role ... and Leigh worked very very hard, even though it was apparent from early on that she was in over her head in many ways. Many people, though, do not recognize, "Oh. I am in over my head. I need help." Leigh did. Yes, the costumes and wigs helped her with her part ... it created a certain look, and her beauty was of that show-stopping breathless kind ... the Elizabeth Taylor kind ... so there was THAT, but Leigh worked hard on her acting as well. Here she is in Mask of Virtue:

At the same time, though, the reviews she got at the time were so over-the-top with praise (she was the newest "great actress") that it unbalanced her for YEARS. The pressure it put on her was extraordinary. She knew that she was NOT a great actress (yet) ... but from that early debut she had to live up to it. And she flat out couldn't.

Vivien Leigh is not high on my list on favorite actresses ... She just doesn't do it for me. Her work never gets under my skin. I enjoy some of it, and I admire some of it, but that's not the same as love. However, her journey as an actress is fascinating and I highly recommend the book ... first of all, to young actors - because it has everything in it (early success, personal problems, a later surge, and a commitment to WORK - not just being a star), to anyone interested in acting, and also to film buffs ... because her path crossed all the greats ... For a brief time there, even with her "queer dissatisfaction", she was the biggest star in the world, in the highest-grossing movie of all time. Pretty heady stuff for a young woman from England.

Here's the excerpt (oh, and Vivian had not yet changed the "a" in her name to an "e" - she was already married as well, to a man named Leigh Holman - which is where her stage last-name came from):

It is interesting to consider, as well, that Leigh was, even with all her experience, unable to "fake" anything. She just didn't have it in her. Her husband (Olivier) did. He was a craftsman, and was able to take his characters far far into the abysses of their lives ... without going mad himself. Leigh always had blurred boundaries, which caused her a lot of problems with some of her roles. You can see a bit of that beginning here - with Mask of Virtue - yet she was obviously cast perfectly, and protected by her fellow cast members. But the excerpt is prescient.

EXCERPT FROM Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, by Alexander Walker

Meanwhile, Aubrey Blackburn was still urging his production chief, Basil Dean, to take up Vivian's option. As it was in his own interest to demonstrate the demand for the girl, he reacted promptly to a telephone call from a West End impresario, Sydney Carroll.

'I'm putting on a play for Jeanne de Casalis ... The Mask of Virtue. I need a girl for the ingenue role. Anyone you can send me? Doesn't have to act ... must be pretty.'

The casting director said at once, 'Vivian Leigh.'

Gliddon, in due course, presented the opportunity of 'an important role' to his client, tactfully suppressing the news of how few demands it would make on her.

In Sydney Carroll's office there were already four other girls waiting, all dressed in black to show off their youthful looks. The part was that of a young eighteenth-century prostitute who is presented as a girl of unblemished reputation and rank in order to compromise a French aristocrat. The dramatist Ashley Dukes had adapted it from the German of Carl Sternheim, who in turn had lifted it from a conte by Diderot (and much later, in 1945, it would form the basis of the Robert Bresson-Jean Cocteau film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne).

Though the girl's was not the leading role, it was one that would grip the audience and to say that the actress 'didn't have to act' was a considerable misstatement. She had to suggest how her real love for the victim of the cruel joke chastened and redeemed her. Perhaps Sydney Carroll's opinion of what was needed revealed more about his own limitations than it did about the part he was casting. Carroll was a man of conceit and power, something of a Svengali in London theatrical management since he liked to assume total influence over those he put under contract.

He did several jobs, which nowadays would constitute a clear conflict of interest. For some years he had been the Sunday Times theatre critic and he still wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post while running his own theatre management. He had a talent for 'discovering' actresses to whom he could be a theatrical godfather - and sometimes something closer. As he was not a well-favoured man, this too was a test of protegee's ambitions.

His producer on The Mask of Virtue was Maxwell Wray, a former dialogue director for Korda - in those days, London theatre and cinema was a very small world. He was a pliable man, which is how Carroll liked things; but the latter was surprised when Wray, who had strolled out to inspect Gliddon's candidate, returned and said, 'If Vivian Leigh's the girl at the end, then as far as I'm concerned the part's cast.'

Gliddon saw Carroll's face show surprise at being preempted. Hastily he said, 'You met her yourself, Sydney, at The Green Sash. You gave her your card. You must remember what Charles Morgan said about her.' Carroll, mollified by the feeling that he had already passed a good opinion on Vivian, said, 'Bring her in.'

'I remember him sitting back in his office chair, just looking at this beautiful girl,' Gliddon says. 'He was smitten - and Vivian knew it. She did her usual spell-binding act and in what seemed an amazingly short time Sydney Carroll her at £10 a week, subject to a satisfactory audition. She got more than the job - she got Sydney Carroll round her little finger.'

Carroll made only one immediate demand on her, a small one, but it signified the proprietorial interest he was already taking in her. He didn't like her first name. ' "Vivian" - it's neither one thing nor the other. It'll confuse people. They won't know if you're a man or a woman. Will you agree to spelling it "Vivien"?'

'I changed my name again today,' she told her husband that evening. To Holman 'Vivien Leigh' seemed an even more distant being, a different woman from the one he had married. A world he did not understand or have much use for had been gradually separating his wife from him and now, as if to register their apartness, it had changed her name for life.

Vivien looked so young and inexperienced at the audition that even Sundey Carroll began to doubt whether this virtual child understood that the part she was to play was, in the euphemism then employed, 'a woman of easy virtue'. Not wishing to embarrass her, he prevailed on the actress Liliian Braithwaite, fortuitously encountered at lunch, to plumb the extent of Vivien's knowledge of life. 'Sydney,' said this emissary, after a discreet tete-a-tete on the Ambassadors' empty stage, 'put your mind at rest. Miss Leigh is married and already has a child.'

As Vivien read for Sydney Carroll and Maxwell Wray, their anxiety shifted from moral to technical grounds. Her voice was clear and crisp enough, but small in volume and thin in tone. When she raised it, she tended to go shrill. But there was a month's rehearsal - time to work on her voice. And with the right lighting and positioning, she was certain to look dazzling: her movements, her grace, the period costumes and her youth ensured that. Sydney Carroll knew the extra sensation that the 'discovery' of a virtually unknown actress would impart to his production. As he told her that she had the part, he invited her out to dinner to tell him more about herself.

She acquired one characteristic habit on the rounds of West End restaurants and supper-clubs while Sydney Carroll was presenting her as 'his' discovery. He had a fondness for asking for something special, something not on th emenu, something perhaps coming into season. Invariably, he ordered that dish - it was a way of making it recognized that he was knowledgeable and exacting. John Gliddon noticed how Vivien soon began quizzing the maitre d'hotel instead of going straight to the bill of fare. 'What she couldn't have, she wanted,' was Lady Lambert's comment in later years, referring to Vivien's attraction to the 'all but engaged' Leigh Holman. What was within the gift of others, she wanted even sooner. Young Vivien had a ruthlessness that drove straight to the point in things large and small.

She also had a realistic view of her own limitations and this, as well as Sydney Carroll's obvious fondness for her company, probably reprieved her in those first few weeks of rehearsals for The Mask of Virtue. It was a small cast: Lady Tree, Jeanne de Casalis and Frank Cellier (as the Marquis) were all accomplished players. Vivien was a tremulous beginner. They took pity on her. The play's construction as a chamber drama fostered a working intimacy between them all. They generously guided Vivien through the passages where her inexperience was shown up painfully. For two-thirds of the way, her role was relatively straightforward, personifying the putative chastity and purity that are used as bait for the nobleman; but the last third, when her duplicity is exposed, was much more taxing. Prostrating herself before the angry man, who is threatening to shoot her, she has both to beg forgiveness and declare that her love for him is genuine.

The intelligence with which she read her lines might well have seen her through, but the muted appeal of her naturally small voice caused the audience to come to her, to lean towards her, so to speak, so as not to miss a word. Almost without trying, she invited them into her confidence, thus concentrating their attention, while those virginal looks which had perturbed the play's producers excited their sympathy.

In later years, however, Vivien was the first to admit that she had been very lucky in the direction she received from Maxwell Wray and her fellow players.

'Every day during the three-week rehearsal they nearly fired me because I was so awful. I remember someone saying at the Ivy restaurant: "She'll have to go - she is terrible." I was lucky enough to wear a lovely pink dress, a lovely black dress and a wonderful nightdress ... but I didn't know what to do ... One of the women in the play had to say to me, "I shall not make many demands on you," and I said, "Not more than the gentleman, I'm sure," and it brought the house down and I never knew why. I was that much of an ass. I suppose, though, I must have had some sort of timing to get the laugh.'

That was the naive side of Vivien, which some of her school friends had noticed: oddly, although she had a notable sense of often randy humour, she kept her professional innocence for quite a time - as one of her later films was to show.

Those who knew Vivien best have given accounts which suggest that her part in the play was a triumph of personality over performance - allied to the expectancy that Sydney Carroll had created over the preceding weeks. John Gliddon was present. 'The play itself wasn't of much interest. But Vivien charmed everyone. The second act curtain went up and there she sat as the prostitute charming the old man. She charmed the whole audience. You could feel her charm come over the footlights.' Oswald Frewen agreed, though he waited for a week or so before going to see 'the Vivling', as he affectionately nicknamed the 'dear little creature'. He found her deficient in exposing her own frailties - 'She had to cry two times and she could not do so convincingly, looking merely bored - or even asleep! - when she laid her head on the table to weep.' But he found her 'natural sweetness and loveliness' coming across strongly - and so, apparently, did everyone else.

By the end of the evening, the promise that Sydney Carroll had hyped, to use a modern idiom, had been converted into what Harol Conway, the Daily Mail's theatre critic, called the next morning, 'one of the biggest personal ovations a newcomer has had on the London stage for quite a long time.'

The following forty-eight hours gave shape to Vivien's fortunes and ambitions for years to come. Her parents and her husband had been in the first-night audience on 15 May 1935, and all of them, accompanied by friends, made up a table at the Florida, a fashionable night-club, until the first editions came off the Fleet Street presses. Vivien didn't need to strain her eyes in the dim lights of the night-club in order to discern her triumph - it was writ in headlines. The critics praised her without exception and the reporters succeeded in extracting a news angle from her 'discovery,' so that it ran both in the review columns and on the news pages. A very powerful combination.

'New 19-year-old Star,' cried the Daily Mail. Harold Conway hadn't waited for his enthusiasm to cool. He had gone straight to Vivien's dressing-room to report (and create) the phenomenon. 'A new young British star ... arose on the British stage last night with a spectacular suddenness which set playgoers cheering with surprised delight ... In a difficult leading costume role, her exceptional beauty and assured acting set the experienced first-night audience excitedly asking each other who this unknown actress was.' The praise in the other papers was pervasive and unanimous. A sense of exhilaration was created by headlines and sub-heads like 'New Star to Win All London' ... 'Young Actress's Triumph' ... 'Actress Is a Discovery'.

The interviews with Vivien which began appearing in the papers show the manner in which the Press then, as now, could wish celebrity on someone, irrespective of whether the facts justified the extravagant myths that are manufactured. Indeed a sudden discovery such as hers engenders a carefree attitude towards the facts by reporters pressed for time or misled by their own myth-making. Thus Vivien, just six months short of her twenty-second birthday, discovered that the newspapers preferred her to be nineteen; that, although she had attended RADA for a few months only, she had apparently won 'the gold medal' there; that she had a father in the Indian Cavalry (true in a limited sense); and that she had appeared at the Comedie Francaise. All this, given the years subtracted from her real age, added an element of precocious achievement to what was certainly a 'discovery', but as yet no more.

By breakfast time, the reporters from London's three evening newspapers had converged on the house in Little Stanhope Street, knocking on the door and ringing the bell. Again, the competitiveness of their respective newsrooms urged the reporters on to new angles.

Vivien very willingly consented to be interviewed and photographed, and, judging from the published results, she spent a very busy morning in quick changes of clothes and equally breathless opinions.

According to the paper's sophistication and readership, she was arranged to conform to the required view of her: curled up in the corner of a sofa in homely comfort; sitting on a pile of cushions vaguely suggestive of a harem; clad in a light white summer frock with her bare legs well to the fore; playing a ukelele, that favourite instrument for the outdoor girl of the times; and with hat, purse, unseasonable fur cape and dark town suit - probably the paper borrowed the photograph - holding little Suzanne in her arms, every inch the sophisticated matron of her Mayfair residence.

Under creative pressure from deadlines, other aspects of Vivien were now given a glaze of plausibility instead of strictly reflecting the truth.

Leigh Holman must have winced on reading that 'My husband does not object to me being on the stage ... In fact his belief in my ability has always been an inspiration.' She was asked about her ambitions: not just the ones she had for herself, but also the ones she was cherishing for Suzanne, who was only nineteen months old at this time. Vivien's reply makes it sound as if she were recapitulating her own life in terms of the hopes she held out for her child. 'I believe that Suzanne is going to be an actress too. I hope she will go on the stage when she gets older and I am going to see that she is taught languages.'

The question of Vivien's motherhood understandably came up again and again - despite the fact that, if the papers' first estimate of her age had been correct, she would have had to have given birth to Suzanne at the age of seventeen and a half and been married to Leigh Holman at sixteen and a half at the very least! But achieving fame and motherhood at an undeniably early age gave an allure of unconventional feminism in keeping with the ideal of the 1930s woman who excelled in independent enterprises - flying, golfing, car-racing and so on - which didn;'t necessarily challenge their menfolk's hegemony too sharply. Acting was another such 'safe' area. 'Married and Has Daughter' (or some such variant) was often the second deck of the headlines announcing Vivien's triumph.

Margaret Lane had her report in the Daily Mail headlined 'Combing Marriage with a Career ... YOU CAN BE HAPPY'. It wasn't simply 'fame in a night' that Vivien had acquired, she wrote. She had 'other things to manage', such as 'a husband; house in Mayfair; small staff of servants; an eighteen-month-old daughter.' Winding up a clockwork pig kept Suzanne absorbed, Vivien found herself quoted as saying, 'It was a very arduous regime. I had to leave the house by six or seven every morning when I was filming and part of the time I was rehearsing and playing at the theatre as well. I had to run the house by a sort of correspondence course with my housekeeper - I'd leave her a note last thing at night about the baby and the next day's meals, but I'd be gone before she got up in the morning. Then she'd leave me notes before she went to bed which I'd get when I got home late at night. There simply wasn't any leisure, and my husband and I hardly saw each other at all. That was rather awful, of course, but he was as much interested in my acting as I was, and was very nice to put up with it.'

One of the editorial writers even used these views as a text for a sermon on what would today be called women's rights. It is doubtful whether an increasingly resentful Leigh Holman would have sympathized with it. As one curtain rose publicly and dramatically on Vivien, another seemed to be dropping between him and his wife.

Sydney Carroll had sent Alexander Korda two tickets for The Mask of Virtue, following it up with a telephone call to alert him to Vivien's West End debut. But if Paul Tabori, an early biographer of Korda, is to be believed, the appearance of the film magnate in Vivien's dressing-room after the curtain was a fluke - the last and perhaps greatest stroke of luck for her. Tabori's anecdote has doubtful aspects to it - he says 'one of the film critics' sent Korda the tickets and he writes as if Korda had not yet met her. But there are plenty of ironic parallels in the film world to the spectacle of Korda lazily working his way through supper at the Savoy Grill, along with Joseph M. Schenck, head of United Artists, and only remembering his theatre appointment when the play was half over. He and his American companion got there, says Tabori (who had the story from Korda's financial advisor Monty Marks), in time for only the last few scenes. But Vivien's looks so stunned them - the story continues - that Korda and Schenck held an impromptu conference as to which of them should go backstage and try to sign her up. Korda got first try - and won. However, the neatness of this tale is its own undoing. Korda had indeed said to John Gliddon, 'Come and see me tomorrow.' (He pointedly excluded Vivien; he was not going to let her charm him.) But it was far from cut and dried. Besides Vivien, Gliddon alone knew that 'The only film contract in England she would sign was with Korda - she had told me so.' But he certainly wasn't telling this to Korda.

Her ultimatum was influenced by her annoyance over Basil Dean's delay in taking up her Associated British Pictures option. She felt his lack of interest to be 'demeaning'. Gliddon did not see it this way.

'Actually, this decision saved her career,' says the agent. If Dean had taken up the option, she would have been bound to a company which was provincial minded and had no links with America - United Artists was then distributing Korda's films in the States. 'In all likelihood, Vivien would have been offered a run of cheap little parts in cheap little films. She'd have rebelled pretty soon and got herself a bad reputation in the business.'

The Books: "Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh" (Alexander Walker)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, by Alexander Walker

I had seen Gone with the Wind as a kid, and while it's not my favorite movie, it certainly made an impression. One of the things I remember (at least in terms of my response to the film - so we're talking about me as a 10 year old, probably) is that I got so frustrated and hurt FOR Scarlett that Rhett wouldn't take her at her word. That he was so skeptical of her sincerity. Especially the scene when she was crying about Melanie on her deathbed - and she tries to comfort Ashley - and Rhett, naturally, puts a cynical spin on her actions. As a grown woman, I can now see Rhett's point ... but as a kid, I wanted to scream at Rhett, "BELIEVE HER. She really DID love Melanie and she really IS comforting Ashley!" So I guess the movie did get affect me, to some degree. It's enjoyable, and there are some moments that rival the best moments in any movie ever (the long shot of the road filled with Civil War dead and dying, the burning of Atlanta, the hospital scene) - but as you can see, I think the best parts of this film are the larger epic moments ... historical moments. The soap opera tangled-web relationships part of the movie just doesn't do it for me. The plot feels bossy - one of those plots that cannot leave well enough alone and has to keep cackling to itself, "Let me throw THIS at the characters and see how they handle it!" I can understand its stature in American movies - it's just that I personally am not in love with it. I think the story of the MAKING of the movie is better than the movie itself (how many directors did the damn thing have?? - not to mention the "discovery" of its young star - Vivien Leigh).

Of course it was only a couple of years later (in my life) when I saw East of Eden and everything changed, in terms of my perspective (story at 11) - and naturally I saw Streetcar Named Desire as often as I possibly could. Thank God for late-night television and channel 56. That movie was so real I could smell Stanley's sweat, and the suffocating stink of overblown flowers, and garbage, and rain water. To think that that was the same actress who flounced around unconsciously (and annoyingly, to me) in Gone with the Wind was hard to get my head around. What had happened to her?

Many people said that the film Streetcar was superior to the original stage production (which starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche) ... and I think some of that did have to do with Leigh's powerful interpretation of the role (which she had also played on stage). Or ... interpretation might be too intellectual a word. She wasn't natural in the part, the way Brando was in his ... It was almost like she flitted about nervously on the surface of the part, hoping to avoid the revelations therein, and Blanche's inevitable end ... and I think that is actually a perfect way to go about Blanche - the woman who is so insistent on NOT remembering certain things, that she snaps ... Life itself is too treacherous for this woman to survive it ... not because she is fragile, necessarily ... but because she is sensitive. The world is not kind to its most sensitive members. I didn't know how close the role of Blanche was to Vivien Leigh - I didn't know of her own mental instability, her terror of growing old, her endurance of ECT treatments, her fear of losing her womanliness ... but she was able, with Kazan's great help, to tap into all of that in her portrayal. Pretty amazing.

I still think it's hard to look at anybody else other than Brando in that film. Roger Ebert has written about the delicate moment when Brando picks up a piece of fluff, in the middle of a scene. To compare that with his brutish manners and overall boarishness is to see a true genius at work - someone who didn't say "No" to any of his impulses. Unfortunately, I see a lot of actors who have played Stanely - say "no" to things that they do not consider to be "Stanley-ish". In other words: they judge the character, they condescend (they don't know that that's what they are doing - but oh yes, they are - they consciously LIMIT Stanely, by saying, "Oh, Stanley wouldn't do that ..." Brando did whatever the hell he felt like doing, including noticing a tiny bit of fluff and plucking it off a sweater with almost a crook-ed pinkie - an elegant careful gesture ... No limits on Stanley.) So you know. Who can compete? Everyone is good in that film, particularly Karl Malden ... but Vivien Leigh burns with a nervous brightness that at times is unbearable to watch. You want to just put her in bed, and gently rub her forehead, telling her that everything is going to be okay. Even in her "gay" moments, there is fear flicking at her heels ... and Leigh portrays that brilliantly. It's not that it doesn't seem like it's acting ... it DOES seem like it's acting - but that is perfect for the role as well.

Alexander Walker's book focuses mainly on the marriage between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh - an oftentimes stormy yet long-lasting deep relationship. They were clearly in love, and Leigh (always a bit of a fantasist - which created many of her problems later in life) had dreams of she and Olivier being considered the new "Lunt-Fontaine". Things didn't quite work out that way, and Walker documents the various breakdowns and miscarriages and problems in the marriage to such a degree that I actually found it boring. Life is more than marriage. But perhaps for Leigh she found it difficult to balance her marriage with her ambitions ... especially because she was married to a man generally considered the greatest damn actor alive! Not that her star needed shining ... she was a superstar forevermore from her performance as Scarlett O'Hara ... but she was not a satisfied person. In many ways, there is some truth to that "queer divine dissatisfaction" phrase from Martha Graham's famous letter to Agnes DeMille:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not yours to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is ever pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

After years of dissatisfaction myself, I am not sure I can say what the hell is so "divine" about it, Martha, although I would concede that it is "queer", and my unrest could barely be referred to as "blessed" - but REGARDLESS. There is much in that famous oft-quoted (TOO OFTEN) paragraph that rings true. I thought of it this morning when I was getting ready to write this post, and thinking about Vivien Leigh and her journey. She had great good fortune. Much of what happened to her was right place-right time kind of stuff, although she did have powerful peopl in her corner from the beginning. She also knew what she had to work on as an actress, and set herself the task of working on it. Her great good fortune did not make her lazy. But within her, there was an eternal feeling of "queer divine dissatisfaction" - which ended up gnawing away at her, leaving her a shell of a woman by the end. At least that is the portrait painted in this biography. You wonder what it is that makes her so frightened. And yet I really relate to her in many ways, especially in her fears of growing older and being forgotten. She was so beautiful it took people's breaths away ... yet she wanted to be known as more than just a pretty face. Yet when she began to grow older, she really started to lose her mind, and needed incessant reassurance she was still beautiful. It is thought she had bipolar disorder, and she also was very ill a lot of the time - with tuberculosis - which caused her to be laid low for months at a time. It was a turbulent existence.

But for quite some time, she and Olivier were the premiere cosmopolitan actor-y couple in the world, living it up for the camera, onscreen and off. They were fish-out-of-water in Hollywood (although there was a huge British" colony there) - and there are great stories of the two of them, early on, doing movies for the first time, trying to reconcile their stagecraft with what was needed for the medium of the movies.

(I love love love that photo.)

The impression I am left with, from Walker's book, is an unfortunate one. She comes off as spoiled, impossible, headstrong (not always in a good way) and mentally ill. I wanted to choose an excerpt that highlighted her strengths, rather than her weaknesses (because I'm all about that ... what are good at?? I also love moments of "first success" in someone's life) - so I chose an excerpt from her first big play in London, a costume drama called The Mask of Virtue. This was pre-Hollywood, pre- GoneWith the Wind, pre-Olivier, pre Korda ... The Mask of Virtue was the vehicle - even more so than Gone with the Wind that ended up making stardom possible. Because without Mask of Virtue, there would have been no Hollywood, no GWTW. Leigh was young and full of ambition ... yet she was cast mainly because she looked right, and the costumes would just highlight her beauty. It was a star part: a double-role ... and Leigh worked very very hard, even though it was apparent from early on that she was in over her head in many ways. Many people, though, do not recognize, "Oh. I am in over my head. I need help." Leigh did. Yes, the costumes and wigs helped her with her part ... it created a certain look, and her beauty was of that show-stopping breathless kind ... the Elizabeth Taylor kind ... so there was THAT, but Leigh worked hard on her acting as well. Here she is in Mask of Virtue:

At the same time, though, the reviews she got at the time were so over-the-top with praise (she was the newest "great actress") that it unbalanced her for YEARS. The pressure it put on her was extraordinary. She knew that she was NOT a great actress (yet) ... but from that early debut she had to live up to it. And she flat out couldn't.

Vivien Leigh is not high on my list on favorite actresses ... She just doesn't do it for me. Her work never gets under my skin. I enjoy some of it, and I admire some of it, but that's not the same as love. However, her journey as an actress is fascinating and I highly recommend the book ... first of all, to young actors - because it has everything in it (early success, personal problems, a later surge, and a commitment to WORK - not just being a star), to anyone interested in acting, and also to film buffs ... because her path crossed all the greats ... For a brief time there, even with her "queer dissatisfaction", she was the biggest star in the world, in the highest-grossing movie of all time. Pretty heady stuff for a young woman from England.

Here's the excerpt (oh, and Vivian had not yet changed the "a" in her name to an "e" - she was already married as well, to a man named Leigh Holman - which is where her stage last-name came from):

It is interesting to consider, as well, that Leigh was, even with all her experience, unable to "fake" anything. She just didn't have it in her. Her husband (Olivier) did. He was a craftsman, and was able to take his characters far far into the abysses of their lives ... without going mad himself. Leigh always had blurred boundaries, which caused her a lot of problems with some of her roles. You can see a bit of that beginning here - with Mask of Virtue - yet she was obviously cast perfectly, and protected by her fellow cast members. But the excerpt is prescient.

EXCERPT FROM Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, by Alexander Walker

Meanwhile, Aubrey Blackburn was still urging his production chief, Basil Dean, to take up Vivian's option. As it was in his own interest to demonstrate the demand for the girl, he reacted promptly to a telephone call from a West End impresario, Sydney Carroll.

'I'm putting on a play for Jeanne de Casalis ... The Mask of Virtue. I need a girl for the ingenue role. Anyone you can send me? Doesn't have to act ... must be pretty.'

The casting director said at once, 'Vivian Leigh.'

Gliddon, in due course, presented the opportunity of 'an important role' to his client, tactfully suppressing the news of how few demands it would make on her.

In Sydney Carroll's office there were already four other girls waiting, all dressed in black to show off their youthful looks. The part was that of a young eighteenth-century prostitute who is presented as a girl of unblemished reputation and rank in order to compromise a French aristocrat. The dramatist Ashley Dukes had adapted it from the German of Carl Sternheim, who in turn had lifted it from a conte by Diderot (and much later, in 1945, it would form the basis of the Robert Bresson-Jean Cocteau film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne).

Though the girl's was not the leading role, it was one that would grip the audience and to say that the actress 'didn't have to act' was a considerable misstatement. She had to suggest how her real love for the victim of the cruel joke chastened and redeemed her. Perhaps Sydney Carroll's opinion of what was needed revealed more about his own limitations than it did about the part he was casting. Carroll was a man of conceit and power, something of a Svengali in London theatrical management since he liked to assume total influence over those he put under contract.

He did several jobs, which nowadays would constitute a clear conflict of interest. For some years he had been the Sunday Times theatre critic and he still wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post while running his own theatre management. He had a talent for 'discovering' actresses to whom he could be a theatrical godfather - and sometimes something closer. As he was not a well-favoured man, this too was a test of protegee's ambitions.

His producer on The Mask of Virtue was Maxwell Wray, a former dialogue director for Korda - in those days, London theatre and cinema was a very small world. He was a pliable man, which is how Carroll liked things; but the latter was surprised when Wray, who had strolled out to inspect Gliddon's candidate, returned and said, 'If Vivian Leigh's the girl at the end, then as far as I'm concerned the part's cast.'

Gliddon saw Carroll's face show surprise at being preempted. Hastily he said, 'You met her yourself, Sydney, at The Green Sash. You gave her your card. You must remember what Charles Morgan said about her.' Carroll, mollified by the feeling that he had already passed a good opinion on Vivian, said, 'Bring her in.'

'I remember him sitting back in his office chair, just looking at this beautiful girl,' Gliddon says. 'He was smitten - and Vivian knew it. She did her usual spell-binding act and in what seemed an amazingly short time Sydney Carroll her at £10 a week, subject to a satisfactory audition. She got more than the job - she got Sydney Carroll round her little finger.'

Carroll made only one immediate demand on her, a small one, but it signified the proprietorial interest he was already taking in her. He didn't like her first name. ' "Vivian" - it's neither one thing nor the other. It'll confuse people. They won't know if you're a man or a woman. Will you agree to spelling it "Vivien"?'

'I changed my name again today,' she told her husband that evening. To Holman 'Vivien Leigh' seemed an even more distant being, a different woman from the one he had married. A world he did not understand or have much use for had been gradually separating his wife from him and now, as if to register their apartness, it had changed her name for life.

Vivien looked so young and inexperienced at the audition that even Sundey Carroll began to doubt whether this virtual child understood that the part she was to play was, in the euphemism then employed, 'a woman of easy virtue'. Not wishing to embarrass her, he prevailed on the actress Liliian Braithwaite, fortuitously encountered at lunch, to plumb the extent of Vivien's knowledge of life. 'Sydney,' said this emissary, after a discreet tete-a-tete on the Ambassadors' empty stage, 'put your mind at rest. Miss Leigh is married and already has a child.'

As Vivien read for Sydney Carroll and Maxwell Wray, their anxiety shifted from moral to technical grounds. Her voice was clear and crisp enough, but small in volume and thin in tone. When she raised it, she tended to go shrill. But there was a month's rehearsal - time to work on her voice. And with the right lighting and positioning, she was certain to look dazzling: her movements, her grace, the period costumes and her youth ensured that. Sydney Carroll knew the extra sensation that the 'discovery' of a virtually unknown actress would impart to his production. As he told her that she had the part, he invited her out to dinner to tell him more about herself.

She acquired one characteristic habit on the rounds of West End restaurants and supper-clubs while Sydney Carroll was presenting her as 'his' discovery. He had a fondness for asking for something special, something not on th emenu, something perhaps coming into season. Invariably, he ordered that dish - it was a way of making it recognized that he was knowledgeable and exacting. John Gliddon noticed how Vivien soon began quizzing the maitre d'hotel instead of going straight to the bill of fare. 'What she couldn't have, she wanted,' was Lady Lambert's comment in later years, referring to Vivien's attraction to the 'all but engaged' Leigh Holman. What was within the gift of others, she wanted even sooner. Young Vivien had a ruthlessness that drove straight to the point in things large and small.

She also had a realistic view of her own limitations and this, as well as Sydney Carroll's obvious fondness for her company, probably reprieved her in those first few weeks of rehearsals for The Mask of Virtue. It was a small cast: Lady Tree, Jeanne de Casalis and Frank Cellier (as the Marquis) were all accomplished players. Vivien was a tremulous beginner. They took pity on her. The play's construction as a chamber drama fostered a working intimacy between them all. They generously guided Vivien through the passages where her inexperience was shown up painfully. For two-thirds of the way, her role was relatively straightforward, personifying the putative chastity and purity that are used as bait for the nobleman; but the last third, when her duplicity is exposed, was much more taxing. Prostrating herself before the angry man, who is threatening to shoot her, she has both to beg forgiveness and declare that her love for him is genuine.

The intelligence with which she read her lines might well have seen her through, but the muted appeal of her naturally small voice caused the audience to come to her, to lean towards her, so to speak, so as not to miss a word. Almost without trying, she invited them into her confidence, thus concentrating their attention, while those virginal looks which had perturbed the play's producers excited their sympathy.

In later years, however, Vivien was the first to admit that she had been very lucky in the direction she received from Maxwell Wray and her fellow players.

'Every day during the three-week rehearsal they nearly fired me because I was so awful. I remember someone saying at the Ivy restaurant: "She'll have to go - she is terrible." I was lucky enough to wear a lovely pink dress, a lovely black dress and a wonderful nightdress ... but I didn't know what to do ... One of the women in the play had to say to me, "I shall not make many demands on you," and I said, "Not more than the gentleman, I'm sure," and it brought the house down and I never knew why. I was that much of an ass. I suppose, though, I must have had some sort of timing to get the laugh.'

That was the naive side of Vivien, which some of her school friends had noticed: oddly, although she had a notable sense of often randy humour, she kept her professional innocence for quite a time - as one of her later films was to show.

Those who knew Vivien best have given accounts which suggest that her part in the play was a triumph of personality over performance - allied to the expectancy that Sydney Carroll had created over the preceding weeks. John Gliddon was present. 'The play itself wasn't of much interest. But Vivien charmed everyone. The second act curtain went up and there she sat as the prostitute charming the old man. She charmed the whole audience. You could feel her charm come over the footlights.' Oswald Frewen agreed, though he waited for a week or so before going to see 'the Vivling', as he affectionately nicknamed the 'dear little creature'. He found her deficient in exposing her own frailties - 'She had to cry two times and she could not do so convincingly, looking merely bored - or even asleep! - when she laid her head on the table to weep.' But he found her 'natural sweetness and loveliness' coming across strongly - and so, apparently, did everyone else.

By the end of the evening, the promise that Sydney Carroll had hyped, to use a modern idiom, had been converted into what Harol Conway, the Daily Mail's theatre critic, called the next morning, 'one of the biggest personal ovations a newcomer has had on the London stage for quite a long time.'

The following forty-eight hours gave shape to Vivien's fortunes and ambitions for years to come. Her parents and her husband had been in the first-night audience on 15 May 1935, and all of them, accompanied by friends, made up a table at the Florida, a fashionable night-club, until the first editions came off the Fleet Street presses. Vivien didn't need to strain her eyes in the dim lights of the night-club in order to discern her triumph - it was writ in headlines. The critics praised her without exception and the reporters succeeded in extracting a news angle from her 'discovery,' so that it ran both in the review columns and on the news pages. A very powerful combination.

'New 19-year-old Star,' cried the Daily Mail. Harold Conway hadn't waited for his enthusiasm to cool. He had gone straight to Vivien's dressing-room to report (and create) the phenomenon. 'A new young British star ... arose on the British stage last night with a spectacular suddenness which set playgoers cheering with surprised delight ... In a difficult leading costume role, her exceptional beauty and assured acting set the experienced first-night audience excitedly asking each other who this unknown actress was.' The praise in the other papers was pervasive and unanimous. A sense of exhilaration was created by headlines and sub-heads like 'New Star to Win All London' ... 'Young Actress's Triumph' ... 'Actress Is a Discovery'.

The interviews with Vivien which began appearing in the papers show the manner in which the Press then, as now, could wish celebrity on someone, irrespective of whether the facts justified the extravagant myths that are manufactured. Indeed a sudden discovery such as hers engenders a carefree attitude towards the facts by reporters pressed for time or misled by their own myth-making. Thus Vivien, just six months short of her twenty-second birthday, discovered that the newspapers preferred her to be nineteen; that, although she had attended RADA for a few months only, she had apparently won 'the gold medal' there; that she had a father in the Indian Cavalry (true in a limited sense); and that she had appeared at the Comedie Francaise. All this, given the years subtracted from her real age, added an element of precocious achievement to what was certainly a 'discovery', but as yet no more.

By breakfast time, the reporters from London's three evening newspapers had converged on the house in Little Stanhope Street, knocking on the door and ringing the bell. Again, the competitiveness of their respective newsrooms urged the reporters on to new angles.

Vivien very willingly consented to be interviewed and photographed, and, judging from the published results, she spent a very busy morning in quick changes of clothes and equally breathless opinions.

According to the paper's sophistication and readership, she was arranged to conform to the required view of her: curled up in the corner of a sofa in homely comfort; sitting on a pile of cushions vaguely suggestive of a harem; clad in a light white summer frock with her bare legs well to the fore; playing a ukelele, that favourite instrument for the outdoor girl of the times; and with hat, purse, unseasonable fur cape and dark town suit - probably the paper borrowed the photograph - holding little Suzanne in her arms, every inch the sophisticated matron of her Mayfair residence.

Under creative pressure from deadlines, other aspects of Vivien were now given a glaze of plausibility instead of strictly reflecting the truth.

Leigh Holman must have winced on reading that 'My husband does not object to me being on the stage ... In fact his belief in my ability has always been an inspiration.' She was asked about her ambitions: not just the ones she had for herself, but also the ones she was cherishing for Suzanne, who was only nineteen months old at this time. Vivien's reply makes it sound as if she were recapitulating her own life in terms of the hopes she held out for her child. 'I believe that Suzanne is going to be an actress too. I hope she will go on the stage when she gets older and I am going to see that she is taught languages.'

The question of Vivien's motherhood understandably came up again and again - despite the fact that, if the papers' first estimate of her age had been correct, she would have had to have given birth to Suzanne at the age of seventeen and a half and been married to Leigh Holman at sixteen and a half at the very least! But achieving fame and motherhood at an undeniably early age gave an allure of unconventional feminism in keeping with the ideal of the 1930s woman who excelled in independent enterprises - flying, golfing, car-racing and so on - which didn;'t necessarily challenge their menfolk's hegemony too sharply. Acting was another such 'safe' area. 'Married and Has Daughter' (or some such variant) was often the second deck of the headlines announcing Vivien's triumph.

Margaret Lane had her report in the Daily Mail headlined 'Combing Marriage with a Career ... YOU CAN BE HAPPY'. It wasn't simply 'fame in a night' that Vivien had acquired, she wrote. She had 'other things to manage', such as 'a husband; house in Mayfair; small staff of servants; an eighteen-month-old daughter.' Winding up a clockwork pig kept Suzanne absorbed, Vivien found herself quoted as saying, 'It was a very arduous regime. I had to leave the house by six or seven every morning when I was filming and part of the time I was rehearsing and playing at the theatre as well. I had to run the house by a sort of correspondence course with my housekeeper - I'd leave her a note last thing at night about the baby and the next day's meals, but I'd be gone before she got up in the morning. Then she'd leave me notes before she went to bed which I'd get when I got home late at night. There simply wasn't any leisure, and my husband and I hardly saw each other at all. That was rather awful, of course, but he was as much interested in my acting as I was, and was very nice to put up with it.'

One of the editorial writers even used these views as a text for a sermon on what would today be called women's rights. It is doubtful whether an increasingly resentful Leigh Holman would have sympathized with it. As one curtain rose publicly and dramatically on Vivien, another seemed to be dropping between him and his wife.

Sydney Carroll had sent Alexander Korda two tickets for The Mask of Virtue, following it up with a telephone call to alert him to Vivien's West End debut. But if Paul Tabori, an early biographer of Korda, is to be believed, the appearance of the film magnate in Vivien's dressing-room after the curtain was a fluke - the last and perhaps greatest stroke of luck for her. Tabori's anecdote has doubtful aspects to it - he says 'one of the film critics' sent Korda the tickets and he writes as if Korda had not yet met her. But there are plenty of ironic parallels in the film world to the spectacle of Korda lazily working his way through supper at the Savoy Grill, along with Joseph M. Schenck, head of United Artists, and only remembering his theatre appointment when the play was half over. He and his American companion got there, says Tabori (who had the story from Korda's financial advisor Monty Marks), in time for only the last few scenes. But Vivien's looks so stunned them - the story continues - that Korda and Schenck held an impromptu conference as to which of them should go backstage and try to sign her up. Korda got first try - and won. However, the neatness of this tale is its own undoing. Korda had indeed said to John Gliddon, 'Come and see me tomorrow.' (He pointedly excluded Vivien; he was not going to let her charm him.) But it was far from cut and dried. Besides Vivien, Gliddon alone knew that 'The only film contract in England she would sign was with Korda - she had told me so.' But he certainly wasn't telling this to Korda.

Her ultimatum was influenced by her annoyance over Basil Dean's delay in taking up her Associated British Pictures option. She felt his lack of interest to be 'demeaning'. Gliddon did not see it this way.

'Actually, this decision saved her career,' says the agent. If Dean had taken up the option, she would have been bound to a company which was provincial minded and had no links with America - United Artists was then distributing Korda's films in the States. 'In all likelihood, Vivien would have been offered a run of cheap little parts in cheap little films. She'd have rebelled pretty soon and got herself a bad reputation in the business.'

The Books: "Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat" (Edward McPherson)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson

I loved coming back to the house on Cape Cod on a drizzly day, and seeing Cashel curled up in a chair with his laptop on his lap, watching Buster Keaton movies. "Auntie Sheila, Buster Keaton always looks like this," he called out to me - and I looked at him, and Cashel pulled a long solemn face. Cashel (although he is becoming a mini-mogul, so I shouldn't make too many generalizations) wasn't looking at those movies as a piece of nostalgic Americana, or as "movies back then" ... or as museum pieces ... He sat there in his chair, watching, and laughing so hard that his belly shook like a bowlful of jelly. So that, in the end, is all that really matters. Scholars can opine, critics can tell us what to look for and weigh in with judgements ... but a small boy wiping tears of laughter off his face in the summer of 2007 over Buster Keaton movies is the biggest stamp of approval I can think of.

Coming out of vaudeville (a family tradition), Keaton performed with his parents as a small boy (already showing a great penchant for acrobatics and pratfalls) - before launching off on his own. Getting into movies was not a natural leap for him - he wasn't sure what this brand new medium would be all about and how he could fit into it ... which is one of those wonderful ironies of life. Keaton has become one of the greatest directors of all time, and his movies - a couple in particular - are regularly ranked as the best movies of all time ... and in many ways, Keaton, more than anyone, understood the silent era - and used it to its fullest effect. He really stands alone and apart. He's on some other weird plane - I don't know how to describe it: truly funny, unbelievably inventive, yet with this strange keen of sadness through all of it - real sadness, not kitschy vaudeville pantomime sadness ... It's hard to pin down. And then of course there's his athleticism. Nobody can touch him there. I mean, all those silent comedy stars were amazing athletes - they had to be - but Keaton was on another level. He had the fearlessness about him of all the top athletes (you know, the "let me pause in mid-air" type athletes) - the types who move first, think later. There are great stories about the day his crew filmed the famous house-falling-on-Buster scene and the camera man had to cover his eyes, he couldn't look. Many of the crew felt the same way. They felt: I can't sit here and watch a man be killed ... on camera ... Buster, that is effed up.

Akbar Abdi is one of Iran's biggest current-day comedic actors (he has said, "I am the Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire of Iran" because one of his biggest hits The Snowman involves him dressing up in drag in order to get a Visa. The film has been banned for pretty much EVER by the Ministry of Culture - but no matter ... bootleg DVDs have made sure that everyone is Iran has seen The Snowman!) Robin Wright, US writer and journalist, interviewed Abdi and asked him who his favorite actor or director was. To Abdi the answer was easy:

It's probably Buster Keaton. For him, humanity is important. He cares about the other side of the coin. Sometimes when I've seen his films or biography I've actually broken into tears because I see a similarity between us. He was a very lonely person. And usually comedians know sadness better than others

The appeal crosses centuries, cultural lines ... it's extraordinary, I think.

James Agee's four-part essay on silent comedy actors ("Comedy's Greatest Era") in Life magazine was a watershed moment - first of all, for film criticism, but also it started, single-handedly, a resurgence of interest in those "quaint" silent comedies ... which, naturally, could not just be easily rented or seen at that time - in the days before private VCRs or even late-night television. Movie houses began running silent comedy festivals, the houses were packed ... If you haven't read Agee's essay, I cannot recommend it highly enough. He profiles the work of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton - and one more whose name escapes me ... and I figured I'd post some of Agee's eloquent words on Keaton, because he can say it all way better than I can:

Very early in [Keaton's] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn't realize he didn't. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply "silent" of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton's face ranked almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

hahahahahaha One of my favorite scenes in a movie ever.

Here is Agee again:

Much of the charm and edge of Keaton's comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies -- the negatives of which have been lost -- were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because "dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than "dry" wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

I have certainly found that to be the case among film fans. People line up in Chaplin camps or Keaton camps ... I myself never felt the pressure to choose, they both seem so different to me ... not alike at all ... but then there is the matter of personal taste, like Agee says ... and those who just don't care for him. But those who do care tend to be fanatics. Funny how that happens.

I always find his cameo in Sunset Boulevard, as one of the "waxwork" dummies who come to play poker with Norma Desmond once a week - one of the eeriest of all of the famous cameos. To know that that's him. And there he is - STILL with that serious face - performing for an audience who might not even know who he is ... inhabiting that character with a dour solemnity that is Keaton through and through ... it kills me.

I haven't spoken at all about McPherson's book yet!! It was sent to me by a person who reads my blog - it's a slim little book and there are moments where it feels almost like a student paper, awkward cliche-ridden prose - BUT - it is the detailed analysis of all of the films that elevates the book. That's what you need in a book like this. Maybe sketch in Keaton's backstage journey - his deals with studios, his quest for independence - his successes as an independent filmmaker - all of that is important, contextually ... but I really like McPherson's focus on the films themselves: the shootings thereof, the problem-solving, the successes, the not-so-successes.

Highly recommended. Perhaps it would be too simplistic for true Keaton fans - but for those of you not all that familiar with the huge body of his work, and where to even begin ... this book would be a good place to start. It's almost like a Keaton survey course ... I haven't seen all of Keaton's films, and there is much here that has "gone on my list" ... as in: MUST see that someday. I chose an excerpt that has to do with the filming of the movie called Seven Chances (you know, with the big rocks rolling down the hill).

I love this particular excerpt because it shows Keaton solving a problem. Knowing there IS a problem, first of all, and then figuring out a way to solve it.

Also, I have included the clip of Seven Chances from Youtube (THANK YOU YOUTUBE) so you can follow along ... with the excerpt. His gift as an athlete is what I am really aware of, watching that clips ... but there's so much more. I love the excerpt because it shows how Keaton realized (through an audience preview) what was missing - and went about creating what needed to fill the gap ... and the result is the endless avalanche of rocks - which just is so damn funny!

EXCERPT FROM Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson

Buster was sweating in the dark. It was the second preview of Seven Chances and, like the first, it was deathly quiet. They had a dud. From the start, Buster hadn't liked the story. McFermott, the co-director, was gone after two weeks, sacked on budgetary grounds; he had spent unwisely in what was likely an already unsympathetic environment. Buster had shot the opening in two-strip Technicolor, hoping the novelty would improve a lackluster film. He had brought in the brilliant Snitz Edwards, a short, sulky, putty-faced comedian, to play the lawyer. He had thrown in a special effect or two; in fact, Buster's favorite moment in the film was the 'drive" Jimmie takes from the country club to Mary's house. Buster gets into his 1922 Mercer Raceabout and grabs the wheel; the background dissolves from one location to the other - he then gets out. (Lessley matched Buster and the car using surveying instruments). There were even a few unexpected crashes and collisions (a minor leitmotif of Buster encountering out-of-frame obstacles). But he knew the film essentially would ride on the last act - the great bridal chase, when the buttoned-up stage comedy would finally cut loose.

Buster strides down an empty street on his way to Mary's. Unbeknownst to him, a flock of brides follows, taking in reinforcements from side streets. A succession of progressively higher camera shots reveals the massive parade of veils behind him. At the last possible minute, Buster turns around - and takes off.

The bridal wave threatens to engulf Buster. No helpless jazz babies here: these are strong, smart gals, determined as hell. Like a force of nature, they overturn football games and flatten cornfields. They commandeer streetcars and hijack construction cranes. A bricklayer is building a wall. One by one, the passing brides remove a brick, for bashing purposes; once the pack is gone, there is no wall. The sequence is a testament to indomitable female will, in all its complex glory. (The women weep when they think they've killed Buster, then - seeing him alive - leap to finish the job.) Along the way, the groom is beset by bees, barbed wire, and a bull - and almost shot by duck hunters - before being driven into the hills.

In the theater, the chase was getting a few laughs - nothing too loud, but an encouraging chuckle here and there. Keaton cut an amusing figure in his leggy sprint, coattails flying, and he had put to good use the choreographic lessons of Cops. (There is even a moment when Buster falls in step with some marching patrolmen; at the sight of the brides, however, they scatter like mice.) Then, just as the film was fading out on Buster being chased down a hill and into the sunset - a lame ending, if ever there was - the audience sat up and roared. What was that? Keaton and his men repaired to the studio, and ran the finale in slow motion. Then they saw it. As Buster scampers down the slope, brides in tow, he kicks up a rock, which begins to roll. dislodging a few more rocks - as the scene fades, he has three small rocks tumbling after him. The audience laughed, thinking Mother Nature had joined the chase.

And so Gabourie went to work making 1,500 rocks out of wire frame and papier-mache. Some would be no bigger than baseballs; others would weigh over 400 pounds. The biggest were eight feet around. The crew went to the High Sierras and found a long ridge with a grade greater than 45 degrees - to ensure a fast roll. At the sound of a starter's pistol. Gabourie would begin releasing the boulders in a pre-arranged sequence; once they were rolling, it was up to Buster to dodge them. Lesley would keep cranking, come what may.

So instead of a fade-out, the momentum builds. The bit with the bricks and the cranes was just a prelude to what is arguably the most athletic four minutes in film. High in the mountains, the hunters and the hunted part ways, as the brides go to head Buster off at the pass. Keaton speeds along the ridge, jumps a gap, and leaps from a cliff to the top of a thirty-foot-tall tree the moment it is felled by a lumberjack. He rides the tree down, gets up, and sprints off. He flies along another high ridge, which ends in a steep sandy slope. Without breaking stride, he throws himself down the slope, head high over heels, turning front flip-flops the whole way down. Towards the bottom, he somersaults through a clump of rocks - which begin to roll - before catching his feet under him and scampering full tilt down the hill. Now in a boulder field, the dodging begins. Tiny Buster - ever-nosing downhill at impossible speeds - is caught in a bona fide avalanche. He thinks he can find safety in a tree, then behind a giant rock, but gravity is relentless, like a freight train, and at the bottom of the hill are those brides! Buster grinds to a halt. Which is the worse fate? The rocks continue their assault, and Buster dances in and out of rolling death. Rocks fly over, under, to the left and right, as Buster hurdles, weaves, and hits the ground - occasionally getting clobbered. When 500 brides meet 1,500 boulders, the brides scatter, clearing the descent for Buster. On level ground, he is a horizontal blur as he broad-jumps a horse (pulling a buggy), dives under a truck, and crosses some railroad tracks (barely missing a train). He pulls up to Mary's house, only to get his coat stuck on the front gate, which he drags off its hinges and up to the door. Buster collapses across the threshold.

The unwavering momentum, the breathless athleticism, the symphonic pacing, the impossibly sustained thrill - the sequence is a masterpiece. Words cannot do justice to the sweeping cinematography, the fully-loaded (often rolling) frame - running hills, distant horizons, clumps of brush, shadows, and boulders, and one driven, little man. Then comes the inspired ritard. Buster learns he has arrived too late; the hour has passed. Hope is crushed. The girl wants to know whether they'll be married anyway, for richer or for poorer. Doesn't Buster think they'll be happy? Buster shakes his head, no. Ha! Then he explains: without the money, he's off to jail, and he won't share that shame. He walks outside. He looks towards the church, then rushes inside. The watch is wrong - according to the bell tower, they have seconds to spare! - thus he and Marry marry just in the nick of time.

The rockslide rescued the picture - for while not as big as The Navigator, it was a definite hit - but for most of his life, Buster would claim Seven Chances was his worst effort. (In the 1960s, he didn't feel it even merited re-release; he was happy enough to let it remain unseen.)

The accidental brilliance of the last-minute avalanche only reaffirmed Schenck's faith in Keaton's freewheeling, freeform style. Nothing kills a laugh like a scientist - or a script. Bsuter and his boys were fools in the funhouse, guests by courtesy of the management, who knew jokes were best caught unawares, where you least expected. Buster kept all the funny business in his head; he never wrote any of it down - when needed, he'd just sit on the floor and give the sequence a good mental chew. Later in his life, Buster would work out gags by shuffling pennies - stand-ins for people - to the music of the radio, which helped set the tempo.

But the best comic marinade, Buster found, was baseball. Before long, a suspicious number of professional ballplayers wound up on the Keaton payroll. As of Sherlock, Jr., Byron Houck, a former pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, was running the second camera. Around the same time, a talented slugger named Ernie Orsatti went to work as a prop man. In a few years his involvement would be only part-time; in his other, in-season job, he played outfield for the St. Louis Cardinals. (In 1928, Oratti would go straight from playing in the World Series to working on a Keaton shoot.) If the crew got stuck on a busted gag - and couldn't find a way out of the rut - there was no use crying about it; they played ball. (Everyone, that is, but round Jean Havez, who served behind the plate as umpire). Moviemaking and ballplaying seemed very much alike; neither was a job one would take seriously.

Keaton's best features have that boys-at-the-sandlot attitude - a sense of play, of athletic bravado, of rough-and-tumble one-upmanship. Keep filming no matter what: Buster will dust himself off, drain the water from his ears, bounce back to fight another day. You don't get a dry run on a dangerous stunt - accidents are too likely, and injuries make for timid participants - and so you just do it in one take, counterintuitive and impossible though it may seem. These were not typical chest-beating tough guys, but guys simply having too much fun to do things any other way. They might butt heads in the thick of it - games have winners and losers, after all - but they were a team through and through. From each man's individiual sense of ownership to the unit's blurry, pragmatic division of labor, the Keaton Studio was a remarkable collective. As Bruckman remembered years later, "It used to be our business. We acted in scenes, set up scenery, spotted lights, moved furniture - hell, today even the set dresser with paid-up dues can't move a lousy bouquet."

And thus the golden age of the small, streamlined independent studio. Having a dedicated, salaried unit made for cheap, easy retakes and inserts - the essential crew was always on call - and because the studio used its own sets and equipment (as opposed to renting them), post-production tinkering was only a matter of another reel of film. Even off the lot, shooting remained relatively simple. A cop or two might be dispatched for crowd control - gratis - as would any necessary firemen. At the end of the day, Buster recalls making sure each was handed an extra's check, usually for about $10. Railroads readily lent their services and equipment, too, as long as Ketaon left the company name on the side of the cars. The business of 1025 Lillian Way was a world unto itself - a lost world, as Bruckman points out. Soon, industry shooting schedules wouldn't make allowances for afternoons of baseball.

The Books: "Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat" (Edward McPherson)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson

I loved coming back to the house on Cape Cod on a drizzly day, and seeing Cashel curled up in a chair with his laptop on his lap, watching Buster Keaton movies. "Auntie Sheila, Buster Keaton always looks like this," he called out to me - and I looked at him, and Cashel pulled a long solemn face. Cashel (although he is becoming a mini-mogul, so I shouldn't make too many generalizations) wasn't looking at those movies as a piece of nostalgic Americana, or as "movies back then" ... or as museum pieces ... He sat there in his chair, watching, and laughing so hard that his belly shook like a bowlful of jelly. So that, in the end, is all that really matters. Scholars can opine, critics can tell us what to look for and weigh in with judgements ... but a small boy wiping tears of laughter off his face in the summer of 2007 over Buster Keaton movies is the biggest stamp of approval I can think of.

Coming out of vaudeville (a family tradition), Keaton performed with his parents as a small boy (already showing a great penchant for acrobatics and pratfalls) - before launching off on his own. Getting into movies was not a natural leap for him - he wasn't sure what this brand new medium would be all about and how he could fit into it ... which is one of those wonderful ironies of life. Keaton has become one of the greatest directors of all time, and his movies - a couple in particular - are regularly ranked as the best movies of all time ... and in many ways, Keaton, more than anyone, understood the silent era - and used it to its fullest effect. He really stands alone and apart. He's on some other weird plane - I don't know how to describe it: truly funny, unbelievably inventive, yet with this strange keen of sadness through all of it - real sadness, not kitschy vaudeville pantomime sadness ... It's hard to pin down. And then of course there's his athleticism. Nobody can touch him there. I mean, all those silent comedy stars were amazing athletes - they had to be - but Keaton was on another level. He had the fearlessness about him of all the top athletes (you know, the "let me pause in mid-air" type athletes) - the types who move first, think later. There are great stories about the day his crew filmed the famous house-falling-on-Buster scene and the camera man had to cover his eyes, he couldn't look. Many of the crew felt the same way. They felt: I can't sit here and watch a man be killed ... on camera ... Buster, that is effed up.

Akbar Abdi is one of Iran's biggest current-day comedic actors (he has said, "I am the Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire of Iran" because one of his biggest hits The Snowman involves him dressing up in drag in order to get a Visa. The film has been banned for pretty much EVER by the Ministry of Culture - but no matter ... bootleg DVDs have made sure that everyone is Iran has seen The Snowman!) Robin Wright, US writer and journalist, interviewed Abdi and asked him who his favorite actor or director was. To Abdi the answer was easy:

It's probably Buster Keaton. For him, humanity is important. He cares about the other side of the coin. Sometimes when I've seen his films or biography I've actually broken into tears because I see a similarity between us. He was a very lonely person. And usually comedians know sadness better than others

The appeal crosses centuries, cultural lines ... it's extraordinary, I think.

James Agee's four-part essay on silent comedy actors ("Comedy's Greatest Era") in Life magazine was a watershed moment - first of all, for film criticism, but also it started, single-handedly, a resurgence of interest in those "quaint" silent comedies ... which, naturally, could not just be easily rented or seen at that time - in the days before private VCRs or even late-night television. Movie houses began running silent comedy festivals, the houses were packed ... If you haven't read Agee's essay, I cannot recommend it highly enough. He profiles the work of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton - and one more whose name escapes me ... and I figured I'd post some of Agee's eloquent words on Keaton, because he can say it all way better than I can:

Very early in [Keaton's] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn't realize he didn't. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply "silent" of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton's face ranked almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

hahahahahaha One of my favorite scenes in a movie ever.

Here is Agee again:

Much of the charm and edge of Keaton's comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies -- the negatives of which have been lost -- were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because "dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than "dry" wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

I have certainly found that to be the case among film fans. People line up in Chaplin camps or Keaton camps ... I myself never felt the pressure to choose, they both seem so different to me ... not alike at all ... but then there is the matter of personal taste, like Agee says ... and those who just don't care for him. But those who do care tend to be fanatics. Funny how that happens.

I always find his cameo in Sunset Boulevard, as one of the "waxwork" dummies who come to play poker with Norma Desmond once a week - one of the eeriest of all of the famous cameos. To know that that's him. And there he is - STILL with that serious face - performing for an audience who might not even know who he is ... inhabiting that character with a dour solemnity that is Keaton through and through ... it kills me.

I haven't spoken at all about McPherson's book yet!! It was sent to me by a person who reads my blog - it's a slim little book and there are moments where it feels almost like a student paper, awkward cliche-ridden prose - BUT - it is the detailed analysis of all of the films that elevates the book. That's what you need in a book like this. Maybe sketch in Keaton's backstage journey - his deals with studios, his quest for independence - his successes as an independent filmmaker - all of that is important, contextually ... but I really like McPherson's focus on the films themselves: the shootings thereof, the problem-solving, the successes, the not-so-successes.

Highly recommended. Perhaps it would be too simplistic for true Keaton fans - but for those of you not all that familiar with the huge body of his work, and where to even begin ... this book would be a good place to start. It's almost like a Keaton survey course ... I haven't seen all of Keaton's films, and there is much here that has "gone on my list" ... as in: MUST see that someday. I chose an excerpt that has to do with the filming of the movie called Seven Chances (you know, with the big rocks rolling down the hill).

I love this particular excerpt because it shows Keaton solving a problem. Knowing there IS a problem, first of all, and then figuring out a way to solve it.

Also, I have included the clip of Seven Chances from Youtube (THANK YOU YOUTUBE) so you can follow along ... with the excerpt. His gift as an athlete is what I am really aware of, watching that clips ... but there's so much more. I love the excerpt because it shows how Keaton realized (through an audience preview) what was missing - and went about creating what needed to fill the gap ... and the result is the endless avalanche of rocks - which just is so damn funny!

EXCERPT FROM Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson

Buster was sweating in the dark. It was the second preview of Seven Chances and, like the first, it was deathly quiet. They had a dud. From the start, Buster hadn't liked the story. McFermott, the co-director, was gone after two weeks, sacked on budgetary grounds; he had spent unwisely in what was likely an already unsympathetic environment. Buster had shot the opening in two-strip Technicolor, hoping the novelty would improve a lackluster film. He had brought in the brilliant Snitz Edwards, a short, sulky, putty-faced comedian, to play the lawyer. He had thrown in a special effect or two; in fact, Buster's favorite moment in the film was the 'drive" Jimmie takes from the country club to Mary's house. Buster gets into his 1922 Mercer Raceabout and grabs the wheel; the background dissolves from one location to the other - he then gets out. (Lessley matched Buster and the car using surveying instruments). There were even a few unexpected crashes and collisions (a minor leitmotif of Buster encountering out-of-frame obstacles). But he knew the film essentially would ride on the last act - the great bridal chase, when the buttoned-up stage comedy would finally cut loose.

Buster strides down an empty street on his way to Mary's. Unbeknownst to him, a flock of brides follows, taking in reinforcements from side streets. A succession of progressively higher camera shots reveals the massive parade of veils behind him. At the last possible minute, Buster turns around - and takes off.

The bridal wave threatens to engulf Buster. No helpless jazz babies here: these are strong, smart gals, determined as hell. Like a force of nature, they overturn football games and flatten cornfields. They commandeer streetcars and hijack construction cranes. A bricklayer is building a wall. One by one, the passing brides remove a brick, for bashing purposes; once the pack is gone, there is no wall. The sequence is a testament to indomitable female will, in all its complex glory. (The women weep when they think they've killed Buster, then - seeing him alive - leap to finish the job.) Along the way, the groom is beset by bees, barbed wire, and a bull - and almost shot by duck hunters - before being driven into the hills.

In the theater, the chase was getting a few laughs - nothing too loud, but an encouraging chuckle here and there. Keaton cut an amusing figure in his leggy sprint, coattails flying, and he had put to good use the choreographic lessons of Cops. (There is even a moment when Buster falls in step with some marching patrolmen; at the sight of the brides, however, they scatter like mice.) Then, just as the film was fading out on Buster being chased down a hill and into the sunset - a lame ending, if ever there was - the audience sat up and roared. What was that? Keaton and his men repaired to the studio, and ran the finale in slow motion. Then they saw it. As Buster scampers down the slope, brides in tow, he kicks up a rock, which begins to roll. dislodging a few more rocks - as the scene fades, he has three small rocks tumbling after him. The audience laughed, thinking Mother Nature had joined the chase.

And so Gabourie went to work making 1,500 rocks out of wire frame and papier-mache. Some would be no bigger than baseballs; others would weigh over 400 pounds. The biggest were eight feet around. The crew went to the High Sierras and found a long ridge with a grade greater than 45 degrees - to ensure a fast roll. At the sound of a starter's pistol. Gabourie would begin releasing the boulders in a pre-arranged sequence; once they were rolling, it was up to Buster to dodge them. Lesley would keep cranking, come what may.

So instead of a fade-out, the momentum builds. The bit with the bricks and the cranes was just a prelude to what is arguably the most athletic four minutes in film. High in the mountains, the hunters and the hunted part ways, as the brides go to head Buster off at the pass. Keaton speeds along the ridge, jumps a gap, and leaps from a cliff to the top of a thirty-foot-tall tree the moment it is felled by a lumberjack. He rides the tree down, gets up, and sprints off. He flies along another high ridge, which ends in a steep sandy slope. Without breaking stride, he throws himself down the slope, head high over heels, turning front flip-flops the whole way down. Towards the bottom, he somersaults through a clump of rocks - which begin to roll - before catching his feet under him and scampering full tilt down the hill. Now in a boulder field, the dodging begins. Tiny Buster - ever-nosing downhill at impossible speeds - is caught in a bona fide avalanche. He thinks he can find safety in a tree, then behind a giant rock, but gravity is relentless, like a freight train, and at the bottom of the hill are those brides! Buster grinds to a halt. Which is the worse fate? The rocks continue their assault, and Buster dances in and out of rolling death. Rocks fly over, under, to the left and right, as Buster hurdles, weaves, and hits the ground - occasionally getting clobbered. When 500 brides meet 1,500 boulders, the brides scatter, clearing the descent for Buster. On level ground, he is a horizontal blur as he broad-jumps a horse (pulling a buggy), dives under a truck, and crosses some railroad tracks (barely missing a train). He pulls up to Mary's house, only to get his coat stuck on the front gate, which he drags off its hinges and up to the door. Buster collapses across the threshold.

The unwavering momentum, the breathless athleticism, the symphonic pacing, the impossibly sustained thrill - the sequence is a masterpiece. Words cannot do justice to the sweeping cinematography, the fully-loaded (often rolling) frame - running hills, distant horizons, clumps of brush, shadows, and boulders, and one driven, little man. Then comes the inspired ritard. Buster learns he has arrived too late; the hour has passed. Hope is crushed. The girl wants to know whether they'll be married anyway, for richer or for poorer. Doesn't Buster think they'll be happy? Buster shakes his head, no. Ha! Then he explains: without the money, he's off to jail, and he won't share that shame. He walks outside. He looks towards the church, then rushes inside. The watch is wrong - according to the bell tower, they have seconds to spare! - thus he and Marry marry just in the nick of time.

The rockslide rescued the picture - for while not as big as The Navigator, it was a definite hit - but for most of his life, Buster would claim Seven Chances was his worst effort. (In the 1960s, he didn't feel it even merited re-release; he was happy enough to let it remain unseen.)

The accidental brilliance of the last-minute avalanche only reaffirmed Schenck's faith in Keaton's freewheeling, freeform style. Nothing kills a laugh like a scientist - or a script. Bsuter and his boys were fools in the funhouse, guests by courtesy of the management, who knew jokes were best caught unawares, where you least expected. Buster kept all the funny business in his head; he never wrote any of it down - when needed, he'd just sit on the floor and give the sequence a good mental chew. Later in his life, Buster would work out gags by shuffling pennies - stand-ins for people - to the music of the radio, which helped set the tempo.

But the best comic marinade, Buster found, was baseball. Before long, a suspicious number of professional ballplayers wound up on the Keaton payroll. As of Sherlock, Jr., Byron Houck, a former pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, was running the second camera. Around the same time, a talented slugger named Ernie Orsatti went to work as a prop man. In a few years his involvement would be only part-time; in his other, in-season job, he played outfield for the St. Louis Cardinals. (In 1928, Oratti would go straight from playing in the World Series to working on a Keaton shoot.) If the crew got stuck on a busted gag - and couldn't find a way out of the rut - there was no use crying about it; they played ball. (Everyone, that is, but round Jean Havez, who served behind the plate as umpire). Moviemaking and ballplaying seemed very much alike; neither was a job one would take seriously.

Keaton's best features have that boys-at-the-sandlot attitude - a sense of play, of athletic bravado, of rough-and-tumble one-upmanship. Keep filming no matter what: Buster will dust himself off, drain the water from his ears, bounce back to fight another day. You don't get a dry run on a dangerous stunt - accidents are too likely, and injuries make for timid participants - and so you just do it in one take, counterintuitive and impossible though it may seem. These were not typical chest-beating tough guys, but guys simply having too much fun to do things any other way. They might butt heads in the thick of it - games have winners and losers, after all - but they were a team through and through. From each man's individiual sense of ownership to the unit's blurry, pragmatic division of labor, the Keaton Studio was a remarkable collective. As Bruckman remembered years later, "It used to be our business. We acted in scenes, set up scenery, spotted lights, moved furniture - hell, today even the set dresser with paid-up dues can't move a lousy bouquet."

And thus the golden age of the small, streamlined independent studio. Having a dedicated, salaried unit made for cheap, easy retakes and inserts - the essential crew was always on call - and because the studio used its own sets and equipment (as opposed to renting them), post-production tinkering was only a matter of another reel of film. Even off the lot, shooting remained relatively simple. A cop or two might be dispatched for crowd control - gratis - as would any necessary firemen. At the end of the day, Buster recalls making sure each was handed an extra's check, usually for about $10. Railroads readily lent their services and equipment, too, as long as Ketaon left the company name on the side of the cars. The business of 1025 Lillian Way was a world unto itself - a lost world, as Bruckman points out. Soon, industry shooting schedules wouldn't make allowances for afternoons of baseball.

The Books: "Elia Kazan: A Life" (Elia Kazan)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Elia Kazan: A Life, by Elia Kazan

I met Elia Kazan once. It was in 1999 and I was working on a show at the Actors Studio (in a backstage capacity). It was a production of Awake and Sing, by Clifford Odets, (excerpt here) and it had had its original Broadway production in 1935 under the auspices of the influential Group Theatre (formed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford). The Group was committed to socially relevant drama, the development of new plays, and the creation of an acting ensemble along the lines of the Moscow Art Theatre. As opposed to being an actor who has to turn himself into a commodity, and sell himself from job to job ... the Group would be a place where actors had a permanent home (and salary, of course - no small thing in any time, but a huge thing in the midst of the Great Depression) and had a vested interest in the actual acting company (something which could not exist in the more capitalistic structure of the rest of Broadway, where you came in, did your job, and left). Most countries have some kind of national theatre. America never has. The Group gave it their best shot - and while they only lasted a decade, the reverberations of the Group are still felt today. Out of the Group Theatre came Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, John Garfield, Franchot Tone, Morris Carnovsky, Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan- to name just a few. Many of them became the primary teachers of the new style of acting that swept the country in the 40s and 50s - and were responsible for creating the Actors Studio, a safe haven where people could come and work and learn - without the stresses of commercial considerations. It is free. All you have to do is be a member. You have to audition to get in. But once you're in, you're in for life. There is a direct line from the Group to the Actors Studio - and while Kazan was always a controversial figure (first, because of his overweening ambition and ruthlessness - which he ascribes to his Greek-Turkish beginnings, and his experience as a member of a hard-working conniving immigrant family ... and secondly, because of his behavior in front of the HUAC, a shadow which - in my opinion - unfairly tainted his reputation forever) he was highly instrumental in both of these organizations (although the Actors Studio, to this day, tries to deny Kazan's part in its formation ... it's like they want to just ignore how important he was or something.)

Awake and Sing is the story of a raucous Jewish family living in the Bronx during the Great Depression - it ran for 184 performances and was a big hit - the people in the play talked like the people in real life! It was a revelation at the time, when playwrights like Kaufman & Hart and Philip Barry (awesome as they are) dominated the stage.

Elia Kazan had not performed in the original Awake and Sing. His big moment in Odets had come a year earlier when he was part of the sensation that was Waiting for Lefty (he was the one who began the call to "Strike") - and later, he played Kewpie to great success in Paradise Lost - but as I mentioned earlier, the Group was an ensemble. Everyone worked on every production, to some capacity. Kazan garnered his nickname "Gadge" from the word "gadget" - because he was your go-to guy if you needed something fixed - whatever it was. The stage curtain won't close! Gadge'll fix it. This scene isn't working! Let's talk to Gadge - he'll have ideas. The publicity for this play SUCKS! Gadge will make sure the problem is rectified. In many ways, "Gadge" was far too big a personality for an ensemble setting. He always bucked under that sort of discipline. The group dynamic was never for him, although he was a superb collaborator.

But the consensus-building that has to happen in any effective group, as well as the submission to a Leader (which turned out to be Lee Strasberg) ... Kazan didn't do well with any of that. Not to mention the fact that his Communist activities, sincere as they were, eventually (and quickly) soured for him - because the Communist Party wanted to own the Group Theatre, wanted to plan their season, and critique their choice of plays ... "No, this play is too bourgeois", etc. ... and Kazan just flat out did not like that. Don't tell us what art we should put up.

In Awake and Sing, circa 1999, Anne Jackson (wife of Eli Wallach) played the lead, the matriarch. My job in the show was basically as her "girl Friday". I ran lines with her, I got her tea, I ran errands, I sat in the audience at every rehearsal, I tried to make her life easier, whatever she needed. I guess I was also a "Gadge", in terms of my role with Anne Jackson. Katherine Wallach (Eli and Anne's daughter - or, one of their daughters) played the romantic lead. Really nice woman, very laidback, humorous, I very much liked her energy. A guy I had dated for about 2 seconds was in the show, and he played the wild-card wise-cracking guy who was in love with Katherine's character. The rest of the cast was filled with Actors Studio legends. The show wasn't particularly good, but God, I loved the atmosphere.

It opened in the late fall - November. The Actors Studio was renting a theatre on 42nd Street for some reason (normally all of their shows were put on at their church/performance space on 45th Street - where they had been located since the 50s) - and rehearsals, which had started at the Studio, then moved into the new theatre. The production was a big deal for the Studio, far more elaborate than many of their other productions ... and it was rumored that Kazan would attend. He was quite ill by this point, and almost completely deaf - but he was a good friend of one of the actors in the show (the father, coincidentally, of the dude I had dated for 2 seconds) - and due to Kazan's early connection with the show, and the continuum feeling of the Group to the Studio to now ... made it very exciting that he might show up.

Kazan's contributions to the theatre (as opposed to film) are too great to name. He directed more plays than movies - his resume is astonishing. He was responsible for ground-breaking productions of plays by Arthur Miller. He was the main interpreter of Tennessee Williams. An interesting combination of personalities there. Tenneessee: a sensitive gay man from the south, and Elia, a fiery macho Greek-American, born in Istanbul. A tough scrappy immigrant. But I've said it before here, and I'll say it again: I think that without Elia Kazan's strong sensitive guidance, Williams' plays might have crumbled into fairy dust. Inconsequential. Now the writing was all there - Kazan said that all along - that when he first read the scripts, they were complete. Done. Ready to go. (This is extremely rare, by the way, when you're working on a new play. But Williams' plays arrived on Kazan's doorstep perfect). But Williams' plays have so much to do with artifice, and the fragility of memories ... that if you get a director who tries to deal with the delicacy TOO much, or if you get a director who just suffuses the entire play in a certain mood of nostalgia then the plays don't add up to much. But Kazan always went for the jugular. He grounded the things, yet he also elevated them into theatricality, highlighting the symbolism of the plays, making them manifest, tangible. Kazan brought out the animal passion in Williams' plays - knowing that the other stuff would take care of itself, or could be handled through lighting and music. But the acting needed to be visceral, real, taut ... Williams' plays burst onto the scene like an emissary from another planet. American theatre has never truly recovered. Any playwright who comes after now has to deal with the bar that Williams (and, by association, Kazan) set.

Kazan took those plays, already perfect, and heightened the reality of them - made the reality dramatic - and turned them into American icons. Kazan always said that good acting was "turning psychology into behavior" - and frankly he was a master at it (not as an actor - he was quite limited as an actor - he has said, "I was like a violinist who could only play 2 or 3 notes" - but as a director and dramaturg). He understood psychology on an almost cellular level and to "turn it into behavior" was the actor's job, but he set up an atmosphere where such miracles became commonplace. It was easier for some (Marlon Brando - whose entire talent was turning psychology into behavior - he did it naturally - Kazan has said he never directed Brando. All he had to do with Brando was get the hell out of the way) - but to this day nobody can touch Kazan for the consistently great and memorable performances he got out of actors. Like James Dean falling down his father's chest, holding up the money and letting it fall ... That is a prime example of "turning psychology into behavior". Psychology would have led Dean to perhaps tears ... you know, he's sad his father doesn't love him, etc ... but it was Dean's sudden genius that led him to try to press the money into his father's chest, and when he didn't get a reaction, to slowly collapse, like a broken swooning bird. It takes the moment and turns it theatrical.

I have written before about when I first saw East of Eden at the age of 12 - it went off like a bomb through my psyche. I can say without exaggeration that it changed the course of my life. Not immediately - but all roads lead to that movie. I don't even think now (in retrospect) that it is Kazan's best - but at the time, when I was 12, already interested in acting - it showed me something I had never seen before. It wasn't that I found the story touching, or the acting good (although all that was true as well) - it was that it galvanized me, for the first time. It put me in action. If the action wasn't as dramatic as running away and joining the circus, it was still action. I set about on a course of trying to learn everything I could about Kazan, Dean, and - once I learned about it - the Actors Studio. It became a vortex, almost - or some kind of swirling motion in my life - where everything revolved around it. I was hooked. Forever. And look at me now. I'm middle-aged now. And look at what I write about on my blog almost non-stop. It started then - one random night when I was babysitting and I watched East of Eden. It's a direct line.

It wasn't just about having a crush on James Dean. I wanted to know how that type of acting had come about - who was responsible for it??? - and so of course I read everything I could get my hands on about Kazan (or "Gadge", as I called him in my mind - because, you know, we were just BFFs by that point) ... I loved the Kazan stories. I tried to picture myself in his hands, as an actress. What would be my struggles? What small helpful thing would he whisper in my ear to help me nail a moment? What was he like? The later controversies meant nothing to me ... if anything, it just made me sad that he was so hated, because I had such affection for his work itself. It had changed me. I would never look at movies (or acting) the same way again.

I know I'm talking a lot about myself in this post, but whatever, Kazan brings it out of me. (I also think it's funny when people have made "God, you're so self-centered - don't you care about what's happening in Abu Gharib??" comments on my blog in the past. Uhm, yeah. I am self-centered. Blogging is probably the most self-centered hobby that one can have. It is WHY I do it because I enjoy talking about what interests me. Is that your only comment?? Or do you have something else to say that, you know, makes sense? No?) Kazan is part of the warp and weft of my life - he was there when I first "got it", when I realized what I wanted to do with my life, when I discovered the passion ...

So to think that I might be about to meet the man ... Ack. I don't do well in those situations. I saw Gena Rowlands on the street once. She is my favorite actress of all time. I did not approach. In fact, I slinked around behind her like a stalker, watching her every move, memorizing her shoes, her bag, her sunglasses ... but I would have needed to have a bone marrow transplant in order to stroll up to her and ask for her autograph. I just can't do it. (Or ... I can ... but only if you PUSH me to it, like the time I whored myself out for The Rock's autograph.)

I was scared, though. What do you say to someone like Kazan? "I can't describe how much your work has meant to me." "You opened my eyes to art, to the craft of acting ..." "You are part of the warp and weft of my very existence." Loony tunes.

At the same time, during the entire rehearsal process, hanging out at the Actors Studio, lying across the chairs during a long tech rehearsal, running out to the corner deli for a coffee, sitting backstage in the dark listening to the run-thru going on ... I'd have these moments of - almost like my vision went from microscopic to macroscopic ... My perception would pull way way way back and I'd suddenly realize where I was, who I was hanging out with (people who knew Kazan well, who considered him a friend), and also just ... how casual it all was ... I would forget, from time to time, where I was ... and suddenly, I'd have one of those telescope moments and I'd think of that 12 year old girl, imagining herself into the Actors Studio in its heyday - with Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Carroll Baker, Shelley Winters, Marlon Brando ... and I'd get overwhelmed. Even though I was just a glorified stage manager and not a lead actress, I'd tear up. "Sheila. You did it. That 12 year old girl saw this. She knew it would happen. She was planning for it ... and here you are!"

Kazan's autobiography came out in 1988 and it is a massive tome - heavy and thick as a biography of Napoleon. It's enormous. My friend Shelagh (who I also met through the Actors Studio, who is a director) has said that any time she feels stuck in her work, or like she needs a breakthrough in how she's thinking about a certain script or problem ... she'll pick up Kazan's autobiography and open it randomly, to any page, and just read. It's that full of insight and wisdom. Naturally, most of the press that the book got circled around the "naming names" controversy and Kazan's apologia for it - but that makes up a tiny tiny section of the book. The rest of it is a treatise on the creative life, on script analysis, on the actors he knew and worked with ... The stature of the book has just grown in years. It's not that Kazan will ever be able to shake off the controversy ... but the autobiography is now, generally, considered to be a highwater mark in the genre and rightly so. You can't believe how much is in it. I found him to be refreshingly honest, as well. Honest about his infidelities, about his problems as a director - how he found his way ... and also refreshingly humble about his successes. He will not take credit for On the Waterfront - or at least he won't take credit for Brando. The best moments in that film (the glove moment, the taxi cab) were Brando's inventions ... and Kazan always gives credit where credit is due.

The same with Tennessee Williams. Kazan did not "create" those plays - the productions were legendary ... but Kazan is always clear that the writing was there from the moment he got the scripts. All he had to do was create the correct environment and production design - and cast well - in order to bring the script to life.

The book is a masterpiece, it really is.

Awake and Sing opened on a snowy night in December. I had been at the theatre all day, running errands, taking care of Anne Jackson, running out to grab her a sandwich, whatever ... and then it was time for the show. The audience slowly came in - brushing off the snow, stamping their feet ... There was a feeling of anticipation and excitement in the air. The audience that night was mainly made up of Actors Studio luminaries. Ellen Burstyn was there (and she remembered me from the workshop I had taken with her - woman was amazing ... I had been one face in that class of 30 people and she remembered me - astonishing) - Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were there - Harvey Keitel showed up - it was all really fun and exciting to mingle around in the lobby with these people. But the question on my mind (and everyone else's) was: will Kazan show??

5 minutes before the curtain went up, Kazan entered the lobby. He was surrounded by good friends, who hovered around him, and had obviously made sure he had gotten there intact (he was incredibly old and frail) ... He was holding onto a friend's arm, and he had a strange little smile on his face ... as though he knew (to his dismay) that he would be the center of attention ... couldn't help that ... and because it was a relatively cool crowd (I was so not cool, but I tried to take my cue from others) ... people either left him his space, or went over to say a casual, "Hi, Gadge, how are you tonight?" I wasn't in that league at all. I've been around famous people before - hell, there are famous people in my family - I'm not all that gobsmacked by famous people in and of themselves ... but the second I saw Kazan, my knees almost went. I'm serious - I felt a dip in my energy, a swoon, like I was going to go down just at the sight of him. I couldn't take it. I just STARED at him ... and there was something about his age, and his disorientation (did he even know where he was?) that cut through me like a hot laser and I couldn't take it ... I left the premises and went sneaking backstage to see if Anne needed anything before the curtain went up.

I sat in the audience during the show. Kazan was in the front row. He was quite deaf, so I'm not sure how much he heard (there were definitely "projection" problems in the show ... you couldn't hear a lot of the actors). I could barely keep my eyes on the stage. I kept glancing over at him. He was a small hunched figure, so reduced from his virile masculinity that marked him at the height of his career, and it just killed me to see him. I wasn't pitying him ... it was just that I looked at him and was conscious of how much his work has meant to me, and how it impacted me ... and I didn't know how to deal with it. I sat there with tears streaming down my face in the dark - not because of Awake and Sing, but because of that small old man in the front row.

Kazan! Holy Christ!!

After the show, there was a reception in the lobby, with cheap jugs of wine and plastic cups. The cast joined the party, and it was like an old-timey reunion there ... with Newman chatting with Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach was there to see his wife and daughter perform ... I basically hung around on the sidelines, gulping down the glorified grape juice that was being served ... and tried to keep my knees from trembling. Kazan was standing over to the side with his friend who had been in the production (and the friend's son - who had also been in the production - the guy I had dated for 2.3 seconds) ... and that was my chance. Sheila. Don't be an ass. You can't be within 5 feet of Elia freakin' Kazan and not say something to him. Even if it comes out awkward and weird, that would be better than saying nothing. Don't be an ass. This isn't about fawning over him. This is about acknowledging him TO HIS GODDAMN FACE for what he has meant to you. Do it! Do it!

(In a humorous aside, when I went to Taos last fall to basically stalk Dean Stockwell on his home turf - I went through a similar thing. Stevie and I were at the art gallery opening - where Stockwell's work was being shown - and everyone was hanging out outside, there was a band playing, Stockwell was dancing, it was awesome - but ... but ... I so wanted to have my picture taken with Stockwell ... I had already been introduced to him ... and there were plenty of other people there who would politely ask if they could have their picture taken with Stockwell and he was gracious in complying ... so why couldn't I??? Thank GOD for Stevie. Stevie literally - literally - pushed me over towards Stockwell ... grabbed my camera and said, "Mr. Stockwell, could I take a picture of you with my friend Sheila??" Stockwell said, "Sure", put his arm around me, and Stevie took the picture. And I wasn't a pain in the ass, and Stockwell wasn't annoyed ... he was gracious, I was polite ... it was part of being a celebrity, and he was very cool with it. But still: it's not easy for me!!)

So without getting myself together, without calming myself down, I walked over to the threesome in the corner of the lobby: Kazan, old guy who was his friend, young guy who was the dude I dated ... and the dude I dated glanced at me, really friendly, and said, "Hi, Sheila!" I said, "Hi" - dude I dated turned to Kazan and said, loudly, "Elia, this is Sheila O'Malley." Kazan reached out his hand to me, and I took it - and found myself saying, "Thank you. Thank you so much for your work." I don't think I spoke loud enough. Kazan held onto my hand, shaking it, and his eyes were not locked onto my eyes - his eyes were staring at my mouth, trying to lipread. He looked a little bit disoriented. I hoped that my energy at least made it clear what I was saying, But I wasn't sure ... He just shook my hand, in an obligatory manner, and watched my mouth speak.

I then backed off - not wanting to just hang on to the periphery ... especially because Kazan seemed rather overwhelmed, like he was in his own little world ... and I wasn't a part of it ... everyone else there that night was an old friend ... and I just felt really aware of his age, and his struggling to keep up ... It had been a huge production to get him out, on that blizzardy night ... he didn't just hop in a taxi by himself and come to the Studio ... so I backed off, made my rounds to say goodbye to the cast (I would see them all the next night anyway) and went out into the snowy night. There was an empty doorway a couple of doors down ... and I went and sat on the steps, out of the snow, put my head in my hands, and cried. It felt good to finally let it all out. Enough of hanging out and drinking Julio Gallo from the jug and pretending I'm "over" the fact that Elia Kazan, the man responsible for so much in my own life, is standing just over there. It was good to relax. I cried for about 15, 20 minutes, and then got myself together and trudged through the gathering snow to catch my bus home.

Kazan died 3 years later.

I wanted to choose an excerpt that shows his smarts about acting, and what it was that actors need. I decided to go with the following - which, in keeping with the tone and theme of my post, is an Actors Studio-themed excerpt - having to do with the Group, the Method - and all of the different teachers who came out of the Group ... having all interpreted the Method in their own particular ways.

Elia Kazan: A Life, by Elia Kazan

The Group Theatre came apart in 1936, reassembled in an altered form in 1937, dissolved completely in 1940. It was then that the actors and directors out of that experience began to teach what they'd learned. Today, as I write this, there are schools of acting everywhere proclaiming variants of a central viewpoint, the Method. By a curious irony, the rebels of the thirties and forties have become the establishment of the day. No one says, "You have it or you don't" now; they say, "Come to me, I'll make you a star."

Nearly every star today is claimed by one acting teacher or another; there are long lists of their "pupils" in the trade paper. It's difficult to have a conversation with Robert Lewis without hearing him mention Henry Winkler, an old pupil, or drop the name of Meryl Streep, a more recent one. It's a natural pride; architects point to their buildings. But now the thing is out of hand. Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame is dead; his place of business continues franchised, a syndication. Lee Strasberg is dead; his place of business continues. The right to speak his name is bought - at a fat price.

There are yards of books that will instruct the beginning student on how it's done, and how it has been done. Read all about it! The Stanislavki system made easy! I have a shelf of these manuals, but I've found that information rarely helps an actor; training does. Even those books written by close friends have bored me, although perhaps that was mostly because I've spent so many years listening to dogma on the subject. I cannot believe that an actor should be instructed while sitting in a comfortable chair listening to a "guru". The last class I taught (I mean the last, for I shan't teach again), I didn't let the actors sit down for two hours. They did the exercises I chose on their feet and found this exhilarating. The sight of actors perched row on row as magistrates passing verdicts on one another's work raises my hound hairs. When I hear the phrase "master class", I want to vomit.

Today when I'm consulted by an eager newcomer about whom to "go to for help", I generally answer that I can't offer advice unless and until I know more about him - which I make damned sure I don't have time to do. I shudder at the thought of giving quick counsel on the Art of the Theatre, on what will "get you there". Yes, the experience of other actors and directors can be communicated and does help, but on the whole it's better for a young actor, driven by a strong desire, to stumble, fall, pick up, come on again, so find his way. What I do sometimes say is that choosing a teacher is like settling on a lover, one size doesn't fit all. Strasberg, the most famous and financially successful teacher of our day, helped some people - Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn swear by him. Other, equally excellent actors abominate him. Stella Adler, a spirited and flamboyant teacher who emphasizes characterization and role interpretation rather than emotional recall, came to her class the morning after Lee died and ordered them all to stand. "A man of the theatre died last night," she announced. For one minute, the members of her group, a large one, stood, some with heads bowed, all silent. Then Miss Adler ordered them to sit and said, "It will take a hundred years before the harm that man has done to the art of acting can be corrected."

This certainly seems excessive, and I don't know precisely what Stella was referring to. I think she might finally admit, with some nudging, that she learned a great deal from Lee in the Group's first years. I can speak for myself, despite the negative impressions I formed more recently, I owe Lee a great deal and owe to the movement Harold and he started, the Group Theatre, everything. Because I was an actor - and could not possibly have been one without their help or outside their theatre - I've learned never to be afraid of actors, so I've never treated them, when I was making films, as counters in a game to be moved about as I pleased. I've never wished them struck dumb, always opened myself to their imaginations and benefited from their suggestions. I've been able to remain undisturbed by the questioning that other directors resent. Even with the novels I've been writing - if they had one special quality, it's that the dialogue sounds as if it were spoken. I learned from having been an actor.

I do have differences with my old friends and associates. No one who came out of the Group and now teaches does it precisely the same way or with the same emphasis. Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis, Stella Adler, and Paul Mann have all helped actors become artists. I know for the best of reasons; I've worked with "their" actors in films. But they are each extremely individual in their work and I've heard all four scorned by their own kind. Acting teachers tend to disparage each other's methods, and I've thought I detected here and there a hint of jealousy of Strasberg's financial success. As in other human endeavour in the arts, there is a fascinating variety. But despite that, the teachers I've mentioned make the same basic emphasis, which is fundamental: Experience on the stage must be actual, not suggested by external imitation; the actor must be going through what the character he's playing is going through; the emotion must be real, not pretended; it must be happening, not indicated.

That's our word for heresy: To indicate is the cardinal sin of acting. Yet even this is open to question. Some great actors imitate the outside and "work in" from there. Laurence Olivier, for one. Larry needs to know first of all how the person he's to play walks, stands, sits, dresses; he has to hear in his memory's er the voice of the man whom he's going to imitate. I lived across the street from him at the time I was directing his wife, Vivien Leigh, in the film of A Streetcar Named Desire, and would often drop over to see him. Larry was working with Willy Wyler on Sister Carrie and, as ever, concentrating on what might seem to 'us" to be insignificant aspects of his characterization. I remember pausing outside a window late one Sunday morning and, undetected, watching Larry go through the pantomime of offering a visitor a chair. He'd try it this way, then that, looking at the guest, then at the chair, doing it with a host's flourish, doing it with a graceless gesture, then thrusting it brusquely forward - more like Hurstwood that way? - never satisfied, always seeking the most revealing way to do what would be a quickly passing bit of stage business for any other actor.

Including for us, of the Group. We would work on the actor's disposition at the time of the visit, what Hurstwood feels toward his guest and what he wants to accomplish in the scene that's to follow. Having determined these - no, I'll put it correctly: Having expereinced these, that is to say, having found them within ourselves, we'd trust that the detail of how the chair is offered would take care of itself.

Does it? Not always. Which way is better? As in all art, both. There is content and there is form. The artistry is in the passion; it is equally in the way the passion is expressed. Perhaps the problem we have to deal with is how to create an expressive form within which the spontaneous life, the one that yields the unexpected, the dazzling surprise, is free to work. The greatest actors are known for giving the same performance a little differently each night - but it is the same performance in all essentials. Both techniques are important: turning your emotional resources on and off, this way and that, while at the same time directing the cunning of your body to the most telling external behavior.

The technique of exhuming intense buried passions by arousing associations, what is known as "emotional recall" is no longer esoteric. We know all about Proust's madeleine and what it engendered. We are familiar with the glandular behavior of Pavlov's dog. To believe that true acting centers around that psychological trick - a teacher's delight in showing off, because it never fails to impress beginners - tends to make acting a competition as to which actor can produce the greatest emotional show. That is not important, nor is it the Method, which is concerned with the reason the character is on stage and what he wants to - and is able to - do there within the circumstances of the scene. The people of the Actors Studio are often criticized, as were the Group actors, for reducing acting to a display of emotional fireworks rather than playing the scene correctly within its true limits.

The problem of form is still the problem and applies as much to the insides as it does to the externals. Emotions differ; they have different qualities; they are part of a characterization; they are specific. We don't feel alike, nor do we all always feel at top pitch. "In life" most of us conceal our feelings, don't want them to be seen; many actors I know, especially Lee Strasberg's pupils, brandish these emotions as if they were the only true measure of talent. The basic problem of artistic control is the problem of having the emotion and giving it its most appropriate expression. This problem cannot be slighted in acting any more than it can be in painting or music. The great Russian directors of their classic period - before the Revolution fell to earth - Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, and even, at the end of his days, Stanislavski, were dealing with this problem: form.

I recently staged an adaptation of the Oresteia with a cast made up of actors from the Actors Studio, and although they were devoted and worked hard, although they were attractive people for whom I felt affection, they had, almost without exception, poor speech. It was, and still is, parochial and even ethnic, "off the streets," perfect for On the Waterfront. The unconscious premise of all too many of them was: If I have the emotion, that is all I need. They'd been trained by Lee Strasberg. I watched some who had very small parts, walk-ons, prepare in a daze for minutes before they entered, then do nothing original on stage. Al the people who came out of the Group still have to answer the challenge put to them so often, with justice: Why have American actors not succeeded in the classics? Why have these plays, the greatest in our libraries, been left to the English for realization? There is much work for actors in this country.

Much work for directors too. I've twice tried to deal with a "classic" and both times failed disastrously. The plain fact is that I've had no training or experience to prepare me for such a task. There was no tradition here in this country from which I might have learned, not in my time. There surely must be some way of combining what the Group had with the glories of a stage devoted to the verse plays of the great dramatists.

One final word on this subject. There is a power the actual experience genuinely felt by an actor has that, when merely simulated or cleverly suggested, it does not have. You can see it in the greatest performances: Raimu, who, in The Baker's Wife, looked less like an actor than like a baker, but whose enacted humiliations, those an aging man will encounter when he's in love with a young woman, were so truly felt they shook me. Garbo in Camille, unsurpassable. What is her mystery? Her self. Judy Garland, at the end of her life, giving you flashes (by lightning, Hazlitt might have added, as he did of Kean) of her own life's pain when she sang the pop-blues. Caruso and Callas, he with that great theatric voice, hers with one often criticized, both offering depth that made you forget any flaw. Bessie Smith, who made a league of all the down-and-outers in our society, sang for them all and for her race as well. Brando, naked of soul in On the Waterfront, the best performance I've ever seen by a man in films because it had all the tenderness and delicacy in love scenes that you could not have expected. And all those others: Anton Chekhov's nephew Michael, Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Lee Cobb in Death of a Salesman before he "improved" his performance. And that great old Japanese actor Takashi Shimura in Kurosawa's To Live. Those are some of the treasures of my life. You would name others. Now ask yourself why these performances - or your own list - live on in your memory, and others, equally praised, equally famous, do not.

My own opinion is that they do because the actors - whether by technique or by accident - gave you pieces of their lives, which is certainly the ultimate generosity of the artist, and they did it unabashed. You were the witness to a final intimacy. These artists spoke to your secret self, the one you hide. They offered you more than cleverness or technique: they gave you the genuine thing, the thing that hurt you as it thrilled you.

What made these distilled experiences awesome and unforgettable is that in these cases, a kind of fear is aroused - not in them but in you as you watch - a fear that may be the ultimate respect you, the viewer, can give in return. You find yourself unsure of what is going to happen next - or in the end. Will they last it out, will they come through? As in life, there are likely to be surprises that discomfort you. All leading men and women should have something unpredictable and dangerous about them. You should be anxious about what they might do; it could get out of hand. Didn't Bogart have this? And Bette Davis? Will the leading man make love to his leading lady or will he strike her - Cagney. Who can plumb the mystery of Greta Garbo? She doesn't yield, she doesn't make friends, she's not after your approval, not ever. Yes, there should be a persisting menace, even in heroes. They should be the opposite of housebroken, only partly tamed, not quite civilized. Immoderate.

Sitting out front or before your screen, you realize you're witnessing a real event, one more real than life, for in "life" there are the limits of civilization - the police, for instance. In art there should be none. You should not know what the outcome will be. You watch apprehensively - as you did Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, which Bobby DeNiro played. In the company of those performers you should not feel safe, any more than you do walking through a Harlem slum street at night if you're white, or driving over an African savannah in an open jeep as the sun sets and the predators begin to stir. You feel the immediacy that you experience when you watch a terrible encounter in life or read the first act of Richard III. You wish for the best, but you're not sure it will come to pass. You hope, as you do when you enter Lear, that this greatest of the old men of the world will come out of his daze, even for a flash at the end - as Lear does - and for that instant see his life and the world clearly. When that happens, your own life has grown. What's happened to people on stage or on the screen has happened to you.

That is the kind of acting to which I aspired.

The Books: "John Huston: A Biography" (Axel Madsen)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

John Huston, by Axel Madsen

Axel Madsen (who died last year) is one of those writers I envy. I would love that kind of career. He wrote in-depth biographies of John Jacob Astor, the Marshall Fields, Billy Wilder, Simone de Beauvoir, Coco Chanel ... the list goes on and on. The man had a wide scope of interests and he poured his focus into whatever subject he had at hand ... what a marvelous way to spend your life and career. He's a very good writer, too. There's a straight-forward-ness to his prose, a lack of judgmental pooh-poohing (a common failing in many biographers), and a real understanding of the topic. He understood context, and is, at all times, interested in providing that for his readers. To understand John Jacob Astor, we must understand the world he lived in. The bigger picture. Madsen is marvelous at that.

His biography of John Huston came out when Huston was still alive. Interestingly enough, it came out before Prizzi's Honor (wherein Huston became the oldest person ever to be nominated for a Best Director Award - he was 79) - and also before his swan song, James Joyce's The Dead - a project he had dreamt about since he was a young man). So it's strange to read the book - without those fantastic at-the-end-of-the-day elements ... When Madsen wrote the book, Huston seemed to be in the true twilight of his years. And he was, age-wise, but he was about to burst back into popularity and fame - not to mention the fact that his daughter, Anjelica, hit it HUGE (finally) in Prizzi's Honor - and won an Oscar for her performance.

John Huston directed both his father (Walter Huston) and his daughter (Anjelica) in Oscar-winning performances - making the Huston family a dynasty like no other. Not even the Barrymores had Oscars in every generation. Also: to be directed by your father, or by your son ... into an Oscar-winning performance ... Pretty amazing. The last chapter of Madsen's book is lovely, with an elegiac tone ... Who could be faulted for not realizing that Huston had one last burst of creativity and power in him? The man was old. He directed The Dead hooked up to an oxygen tank. Extraordinary.

I love, too, that Huston had been trying for years to direct James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of his favorite books. He lived in Ireland for huge chunks of his life, Anjelica was born and raised there ... and his desire to see James Joyce turned into cinema was always there for him. But, naturally, James Joyce is a hard sell. The fact that The Dead was Huston's final project is so moving to me. It was a true labor of love. Everyone knew it would be his last film. And the theme of the film - of all of us "becoming shades", of moving "westward" into death, or accepting mortality ... was palpably real on the set of the movie. Anjelica has spoken about it eloquently. It was one of those rare moments in filmmaking when the experience OF making something absolutely mirrors the true essence of the thing being made. That rarely happens.

The film The Dead, of course, can't compete with the source material - which is one of the most interior pieces of literature ever written ... but Huston gave it his best shot - and there are a couple of moments (particularly the one when the old auntie sings an Irish tune) when Huston found a way to tell the interior moment visually ... It's a different medium. You can't have a voiceover come in and drone, "Here is what this moment means." (although plenty directors do that, and it's awful, unimaginative, insulting to audiences). So how do you express what happens inside Gabriel when he hears the old auntie sing? How do you show that?

The passage in "The Dead" is so subtle that you might even miss it. It's not a grand climax. It's not cathartic. It's tiny.

A murmur in the room attracted his attention. Mr. Browne was advancing from the door, gallantly escorting Aunt Julia, who leaned upon his arm, smiling and hanging her head. An irregular musketry of applause escorted her also as far as the piano and then, as Mary Jane seated herself on the stool, and Aunt Julia, no longer smiling, half turned so as to pitch her voice fairly into the room, gradually ceased. Gabriel recognised the prelude. It was that of an old song of Aunt Julia's - Arrayed for the Bridal. Her voice, strong and clear in tone, attacked with great spirit the runs which embellish the air and though she sang very rapidly she did not miss even the smallest of grace notes. To follow the voice, without looking at the singer's face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight.

By the end of the story - with its vision of flying westward over Ireland, watching the snow falling on fields and cemeteries and the "dark mutinous Shannon waves" - that moment when Aunt Julia sings, with its sudden startling vision at the end of taking flight - is like a gong has sounded at the bottom of the ocean. The end of the story, and Gabriel's revelation, is predicted in that moment. Huston was brilliant in how he solved the problem of making that moment real to a viewer - who may not be familiar with the short story. Because, let's be honest: if you just stay on the surface, then the moment of Aunt Julia singing isn't all that important. If you just film the surface of it - an old Irish lady dressed in lace singing on a snowy night - you could end up with a scene either frightfully sentimental or tediously boring. Huston understands "The Dead", and Huston understands the deeper themes flowing through the thing, and so he chose that moment to make them manifest. Slowly, slowly, slowly, as she sings, he begins to insert quiet still shots of objects throughout the house - unused, in closed-up rooms, we have moved out of the primary room where all the action is, and the camera seems to wander around the empty house - all the while we hear the old auntie singing. Everything is filmed in a dark soft glow, often with the snow falling outside the window. We see a lace doily on a table. Pictures in frames. A silver-handled hairbrush. All of the objects we accumulate through our lives. Things we love, things we cherish - things that have meaning. Perhaps the objects have been passed on by those who are now dead, who are "shades" - but while we are here on this earth, these objects have meaning and utility. I can't even describe how effective this moment is in the film. The only way I can describe it is to imagine an ineffective or too-obvious handling of the scene: for example, a close-up of Gabriel deep in thought, perhaps tearing up in the eye ... In other words: focusing on the event itself in a literal way - or a way that focuses only on the emotions it supposedly brings up in Gabriel - as opposed to going for broke, and actually bringing a symbolic and deeply spiritual moment into life - which is what "The Dead" is all about. Huston moves his directing eye away from the literal - and into the metaphysical ... He focuses on inanimate objects as opposed to the human lives gathered in the parlor ... and in that way he comes very very close to actually articulating James Joyce's thoughts in that section of the story. Brilliant.

Huston's career was extraordinary, starting out as a writer, and then segueing into directing. Yeah, if you want to be a director, you can't do any better than directing The Maltese Freakin' Falcon as your first picture. My God! Because of his background as a writer, he was always so so good with structure - he was such an intelligent man, a voracious reader, someone brought up in a storytelling tradition, someone who knew how to tell a story.

I chose an excerpt today about the filming of Beat the Devil - which has become a cult classic - but at the time was nearly incomprehensible to reviewers (as well as the cast members themselves. Bogart hated the film.) I love Beat the Devil - it reunites Bogart and Peter Lorre, it has exotic To Catch a Thief locations ... it makes no sense ... you really feel that the entire thing was an improvisational romp, no end goal in sight. You also feel, in ways that you don't in other location movies, that the actors are all having a blast after-hours. Their hangovers are sometimes apparent, Bogart's especially. They seem cranky (but in a funny way), and the characters are broad and absurd. It's not a remake of Maltese Falcon, but it references it left and right, in a winking-at-the-audience kind of way - I mean, with Peter Lorre and Bogart walking down the street, what else are you going to do? The film has grown in stature over the years, and many people adore it. It's that true delight: a 100% silly movie. It has no pretensions whatsoever, it does not try to be serious in the last 10 minutes ... nothing it has is unearned. It's SILLY and I actually wish there were more truly silly movies made. Like Smokey and the Bandit. Or Ocean's 11. Movies like these really have their shit together - in ways that many more serious movies do not, because the serious movies are trying to make points, or be relevant, or have some specific effect on an audience. But gloriously silly movies? They know who they are, they know what they want to attempt, they don't try to do much. This is harder than it looks!

Beat the Devil was a crazy shoot - with writers being fired left and right - and Truman Capote being flown in to fix the script, and joining the mega-macho atmosphere of Huston and Bogey. Bogart was hostile towards Capote until Capote beat him in an arm-wrestling match. Bogart's response to his defeat, "I was beat by a fairy!" From that day forward, they were friends - Bogart got a kick out of Capote, and Capote loved teasing and flirting and queening it up right in Bogart's face because he knew it made Bogart uncomfortable. Bogart would shake his head and laugh ... and all was right with the world. But Capote came in and basically put his own Breakfast at Tiffany's spin on the script - which was totally inappropriate and didn't fit at all ... but it gives the whole thing a lunatic atmosphere of fantasy and daydreaming and madcap hilarity that is hard to describe unless you've seen it. I highly recommend it - it's a lot of fun!

The excerpt I chose today is the one that deals with Beat the Devil. Axel Madsen has a nice specific style, and it makes me want to read all of his books.

EXCERPT FROM John Huston, by Axel Madsen

John suggested they get Truman Capote to work up a new script. "Instead of trying to do Casablanca and Maltese Falcon over again we'll make a picture with heart and humor." Capote, who was in Rome anyway, was hired, as was the new Italian sensation, Gina Lollobrigida, for the part of Bogey's wife. Legend has it that Bogey cabled his agent to the effect that Lollobrigida at least was not flat. In reality he was not, as he said, "a tits man" and Bogart and Lollobrigida never got along too well.

While Capote began working on the script, and Robert Morley joined the cast, John went to the hills above Amalfi in the Bay of Salerno where he wanted to shoot the picture. The production was headquartered at Ravello's Palumba Hotel, which had only one telephone.

When Bogey flew down, John was there to greet him at the Naples airport. Bogart climbed into John's rented limousine and the Neapolitan driver started the climb toward Ravello. The chauffeur was a man who apparently hated to make decisions, for at a fork of the road, he chose to go neither left nor right, but straight into a three-foot wall. Bogey crawled out of the wrecked car with two loose teeth and a split tongue. John was unharmed. "Drove us smack through the wall," he said, shaking his head. "The Italians are an amazing people, eh, kid?"

While Bogey had his teeth fixed Capote came down. He left his pet raven in Rome and when the bird refused to talk to him on the telephone, the writer got John's permission to go back to Rome to see if the raven was ill or just sulking.

When Angela and Robert Morley arrived in their stately car, having driven all the way from London, the production manager told them Capote was in Rome, Huston in Naples, and Bogey at the dentist. A few days later, however, everyone was there, including Capote, whose raven had died, and a cable went off to Mrs. Selznick to join Beat the Devil. Jennifer Jones had originally agreed to do the picture without reading the story because it was to be directed by John, with Bogey as her co-star. She arrived in Ravello to find she was to play an English girl wearing a blond wig and married to an Englishman.

As Capote remembers the writing assignment, "John and I decided to kid the story, to treat it as parody. Instead of another Maltese Falcon, we turned it into a wild satire on this type of film."

Morley remembers Capote writing the script page by page and reading it aloud to the assembled cast, page by page every morning. "He never seemed to manage to write very much on any one day, but then as we didn't film very much either, it didn't matter," says Morley. "The dialogue was at least always mint fresh."

"We sort of lost Helvick's novel along the way," admits Huston. "But we had a helluva lot more fun making the new version."

The evenings at Ravello were given over to poker and the main victims of John's and Bogey's hands were Capote, who lost 200,000 lire to them, and John's photographer pal Robert Capa, hired to do special photo layouts. "Capa was the worst poker player in the world," says Huston. "Even worse than Capote. He didn't cost us anything. We won his salary back each night."

John was inevitably the target of a number of David Selznick memos. David now devoted himself to his wife's career and although he had no business in Beat the Devil began firing off wires from New York. After the third memo, John sent back his answer, numbering the sections "Page 1", "Page 2" and "Page 4". The rest of the Selznick correspondence was largely concerned with what happened to page 3.

But even from New York, David managed to interfere. One day Hubert de Givenchy arrived from Paris, saying he had been summoned by Selznick to redesign Miss Jones's wardrobe. In one evening, he and his assistants fashioned the cotton dummies, wrote down all measurements. The next morning the Givenchy task force had disappeared. As Morley remembers it somewhat laconically, "Miss Jones played her role dressed entirely in white. The Story was that Givenchy produced the toiles of her dresses for the fitting and that they were mistaken by David for the finished product."

Peter Lorre joined the cast. He had not been in a film for six years, was still recovering from a lengthy illness, and had to be given special consideration on the set. The character he played was both saintly and sinister - a German from Argentina who has changed his name to O'Hara but pronounces it O'Horror.

In the script Capote improvised day by day, Bogart and his wife, Lollobrigida, are on board a ship sailing for British East Africa; their traveling companions are Morley and his gang of uranium swindlers, and a creative liar, Jennifer, turns up, married to a bogus British lord (Edward Underdown). Then there's a shipwreck ... With her fractured English, Lollobrigida had a hard time understanding the humor of the script - and of her director - but Bogey had to admit she was a trooper. She was always punctual, went to bed early, and arrived on the set groomed and alert.

Work with The Monster was Bogey's delight again. The unit called Bogart "Mr. President" in deference to his status as bankroller. "Having money in the film makes matters a trifle confusing for the other players," he said. "They never know whether I'm speaking as actor or executive. No one takes much notice, anyway."

Morley's considered opinion on that score was that actors should only take money out of pictures, never put money in. "Actors take themselves too serious," Morley said. "When approaching a part I incline to the principle once put forward by A.E. Matthews. There were only three questions: 'How much?' 'When do we start?' and 'Where?'" Heaving his portly frame into a chair, he added that his own future would be safe in 3-D movies.

As filming progressed, John got the idea that the Ravello monastery, founded in 1300, was just the background they needed for several scenes. With the monks' permission, generators and camera were moved in for shots of rough wooden tables and long rows of simple iron beds. Some of the monks looked as if they didn't quite believe it when Jennifer and Gina walked in - through a door which no woman had passed in over six hundred years. Part of the monastery had to be "decloistered" before actors and technicians were allowed to enter, and reconsecrated when the filming was over. Bogey thought it a big laugh to be shooting a movie called Beat the Devil in a monastery.

To keep everybody cheerful, Huston rented a small freighter and for a day off invited everybody to sea. Somehow they teased Jennifer into climbing the mast. Almost at the top, she lost her nerve and climbed down again. John besought her to try again. After an argument, she left in a speedboat. Hours later, she returned, ready for a second try, but John declined her offer. "When the sun went down they decided to turn the boat around and sail for home," Morley wrote in his memoirs. "To the surprise of everyone except the captain, who had presumably worked out that the time taken in any direction must equal the time taken on the return journey where the same route is followed, we didn't get to bed till six in the morning. Meanwhile, there was nothing to eat or drink. All work stopped for two days, in protest."

Judo wrestling was a setside pastime, with diminutive Capote claiming he could pin down Bogart from behind with one hammer lock and Bogey confiding to Huston he would actually squash Capote "like a bug on the wall" anytime. While talking to Morley one day after a scene, Bogart suddenly felt his arm being pulled up behind his back. He winked at Morley and began to groan. The pressure increased and Bogey let out a real howl and managed to twist himself around to see his assailant. Capote was nowhere in sight. It was John trying the armlock.

The villagers of Ravello took a liking to the movie people. Here was their own "Lollo" caricaturing herself. Here, every morning soon after seven, Hollywood's Humphrey Bogart rode the main street to work on a donkey. When John injured his back, he rode in a sedan chair to the location for several days.

John and Bogey loved to discuss each other. "Work gives John a sense of power," Bogey would say, "although sometimes he just lays in bed and lets them come to him. If you want to get him roused tell him something that appeals to his sense of justice or courage. 'I'm against anybody,' he says, 'who tries to tell anybody else what to do.' John often used to speak of the influence his father had on him. One day when John was a boy, his father took him walking in the woods. It was spring and everything was in bud. Suddenly his father seized a stick and started beating the tree with it. 'I'm trying to stop spring,' he roared. John never forgot.

"Risk, action, and making the best of what's around is what makes him tick. When he isn't; actually on the set, he sees his surroundings as a forest of windmills, bottles, women, racehorses, elephants and oxen, noblemen and bums."

John underlined their differences. "I'm a notoriously bad husband - not like you, Bogey - morbidly faithful to each of your wives. I'm a much better father than I am a husband." Bogart took his acting seriously and said he worked hard. John declared, "I hate people who claim to be hard-working. Anyone with brains doesn't have to work hard all the time." He advised Bogey to amass a fortune of twenty million so he could live properly. "My life span would probably be lengthened if I had that much," Huston sighed. "It's only trying to make twenty million that cuts short a man's years. Spending it would be healthy."

Visitors aarrived at Ravello and John's Italian assistant threatened tourists and locals alike to make them appear in a crowd scene. "I've never seen such an example of slave labor," John commented, shooting the scene.

After pickup interiors in London, Huston flew to Los Angeles to edit Beat the Devil for a United Artists release. It was funny to be staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Los Angeles had been his home since childhood, but the Kohners, the Wylers, and the Bogarts were there to see to it that he didn't get into too much mischief.

Beat the Devil courted - and achieved, disaster. When it was released in March 1954, Bogey called it "a mess". In self-defense, John said, "The formula of Beat the Devil is that everyone is slightly absurd." Posterity was to be kinder to the fluke classic. Wrote Pauline Kael a decade later, "Beat the Devil is a mess, but it's probably the funniest mess - the screwball classic - of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way of finding a style of its own."

The Books: "Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988" (John Houseman)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, by John Houseman

One of the best memoirs ever written.

John Houseman's career kind of beggars belief ... you look at it as a whole and think: "Excuse me?" And not only that, but he knows how to write. His book is, at times, painfully revealing (his tortured relationship with Orson Welles being the main theme) - and then, at other times, funny, invigorating, interesting ... His career spans the entire 20th century, practically - and there is no one story - there are many many stories here. He is one for the history books. His partnership with Orson Welles was legendary. Just that would be enough to make him famous forever. But after the split with Welles, he went on to produce many notable films - as well as acting in many films - as well as winning an Oscar for his work in 1973's The Paper Chase. HE won an Oscar as an actor - NOT Orson Welles! (Welles got an Honorary Oscar - you know, the Academy's way of saying, "Sorry, dude, we fucked up back then!" - and he also won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane which he shared with Herman Mankiewicz - but no Oscar for an actual performance. Houseman won one.)

The rift between the friends was never really healed. So all of that is certainly enough for one life - but no - Houseman went on to teach at Juilliard, in one of the many shake-ups at that institution. Juilliard re-vamped its curriculum, updating it, and hired Houseman to head up the new acting department. One of his "things" in life was to help train American actors to be able to compete with the British, in terms of technique, vocal craft, meticulous character-building ... His students, many of them, have become Oscar winners in their own right. And Tony winners (Ms. Lupone!). He taught everyone. He was feared, and also admired. Houseman was also responsible for forming "The Acting Company" - made up of Juilliard grads - who tour the country in repertory (and still do).

Houseman, in his memoir, comes off as rather sad ... a lonely man, perhaps overshadowed a bit at first by his admiration for Orson Welles' young brash brilliance. The two took New York by storm. It's hard to even list what they did - because it starts to sound ridiculous ... When did they ever sleep? First: they were both employed by the Federal Theatre Project, one of the many aspects of the New Deal, to keep actors/stagehands/directors/costume designers - working during the economic downturn. Orson was like a kid in a candy store. He was a prodigy - and was in his late teens when he started working in New York. His "voodoo Macbeth" was the first production he headed up - an ambitious controversial (as always) project - using non-professional actors (all black) - setting Shakespeare's Scottish play in Haiti. There are clips from that performance in existence - and while a lot of it seems to be smoke and mirrors (lots of loud crazy music, lighting effects, a crowded stage) - Welles made his name with that play. He became the wunderkind of New York theatre. How do you make non-professional Negro actors say the words of Shakespeare? How is it possible? Welles believed anything was possible. Shakespeare was not for the elites. It was for everyone. The voodoo Macbeth was a giant hit - and, in an unprecedented way, a cross-over hit - pulling in a diverse audience. Unheard of at that time. Blacks and whites poured into the theatre in Harlem, sitting together in the house, cheering and clapping. The show was a "phenom". It turned Welles, overnight, into a huge playah. John Houseman, too, was employed by the Federal Theatre Project - and he and Welles found a kinship in one another ... the idea that theatre should be relevant, in-your-face, exciting, and immediate. I may be getting the chronology messed up here, so forgive me - but they partnered up on many productions, under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. One was a modern-day dress of Julius Caesar - which directly commented on the situation brewing in Europe at that time - Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin - It's one of those productions I would give anything to go back in time to see.

Houseman and Welles were partners - Houseman was older, more experienced (he was also an immigrant, with a much harsher background than Welles) - but there are times, in his book, when Houseman comes off as almost completely under some sort of spell. Welles was willful, strong, and hypnotic - everyone agrees.

The breakthru (or the first breakthru) for the two of them came with the fabled production of Marc Blitzstein's musical The Cradle Will Rock. The story of that play has been told time and time again - and Tim Robbins' movie of the same name is a very nice evocation of that entire event ... but suffice it to say that the play itself was controversial (in true 1930s Clifford Odets style - it was about everyday Americans struggling against the crushing power of the state - it was a celebration of unions, and labor organization - and it reads as a cunning and sometimes witty piece of agitprop. Certainly not up to Odets' level - but above a lot of the other pamphleteering masked as theatre that was going on at that time). It's a musical - almost no dialogue - it feels like an opera, at times, mixed with vaudeville. The characters are broad - with names like Reverend Salvation and Mr. Mister ... symbols, archetypes ... and it's a story of corruption, corporate greed, and the "little guy" standing up for himself. The story of The Cradle Will Rock (I mean, the story of the first production of it) is one of the great moments in American theatrical history. I would put it up there with the first time Waiting for Lefty was performed - when the audience all started to yell STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE with the actors ... and Laurette Taylor's performance in The Glass Menagerie when it opened in freezing Chicago. Moments when the theater became not just entertainment - but something larger - something community-driven ... the barrier between actor and audience completely dissolved. (I chose the excerpt having to do with The Cradle Will Rock from Houseman's book - so the full story can be read there. Goosebump time. Oh, for a time machine).

Heres' Marc Blitzstein - author and composer of The Cradle Will Rock - in rehearsal for the show that would become so notorious:

But The Cradle Will Rock was just the beginning for Houseman and Welles. The notoriety they received, the press - was too good to be true - so they decided to forge out on their own, seize the day, and form their own theater company. The Mercury Theatre was the result.

And yeah, you know that whole War of the Worlds brou-haha? That came the following year. I mean, seriously guys, how can you keep topping each stunt?

The War of the Worlds mania translated then into Hollywood - with the entire Mercury Theatre company being put under contract - and Welles being given an unprecedented "anything you want" deal at RKO - which royally pissed the entire Hollywood community off. Who the hell is this Orson Welles? Who is this guy who comes from New York with not a film credit to his name and suddenly gets final cut on his picture? Orson Welles never really ingratiated himself with Hollywood - and much of it can be traced back to that first deal with RKO, which seemed so unfair to the rest of the industry. Well, and of course, the result of that deal was eventually Citizen Kane. The mind boggles. BUT it is important to go back in time and realize just how badly that film went over. It basically took on William Randolph Hearst - and you just didn't do that. Not if you were in the film industry. You toadied up to him. You flattered him. He was one of the most powerful men in America - his newspapers could make or break you ... so he set out to break Orson Welles. And he pretty much did. The film was blacklisted, and never really even officially released - not in wide distribution anyway.

RKO didn't feel they could risk being blacklisted by William Randolph Hearst.

Anyway, the stories just go on and on.

Houseman's book is full of gems, and full of insight ... It's a great theatre person's book - because it's honest, it's about the work, and it's about the loneliness that can come with this kind of career. The sort of let-down ... the feeling that maybe you didn't "show up' to the best of your ability ... and Houseman's relationship to Orson Welles incapsulates all that. The irony is that Orson Welles was meant to work alone ... and Houseman was meant to work in a collective. It just took them a while to figure that out. Houseman was always looking for a family ... a group ... and Orson did not do well (to put it mildly) in groups.

The story of their relationship is a sad one. You wish they would patch things up. But oh well - both of them have other fish to fry. And their careers were really FORMED together. There would be no Orson Welles without John Houseman (although Welles might disagree). Houseman was the producer. Houseman was the one who made Welles' zaniness possible because he provided a stable backdrop. Houseman solved problems. He had the thankless job of putting it all together - behind the scenes ... Welles needed him. Houseman got off on being needed, obviously. Many of the passages here read like a love story, a man thwarted. That very well may have been the case.

Their relationship is one of the all-time great American partnerships. It still just blows me away what they were able to accomplish, as a team.

Houseman's book is indispensable - not just for the electric 1930s years - but for his later years, working, and acting, and directing ... looking for a life that, ultimately, makes sense. I am particularly partial to his heartbreaking performance as Gena Rowlands' cold ungiving father in Woody Allen's Another Woman. To see him play a scene with my favorite actress - to watch his age-spotted face - and to know that his career spans the 20th century ... it's just really moving to me.

Below, is a giant excerpt about what happened with The Cradle Will Rock. An "epoch" in New York theatre history, and an important moment in the cultural history of America at large. Amazing. God, i wish I had been there.

Oh, and how much do I love Jean Rosenthal's journey below??? Seriously, I love that woman. The picture of her circling the block in the back of a truck, perched on top of a piano she bought for 10 dollars, waiting for the word that "the show will go on" ... I just love her.

Many people who were there that historic night said it was the most exciting theatrical production they had ever experienced in their lives.

EXCERPT FROM Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, by John Houseman

The next day, June 15, a dozen uniformed WPA guards took over the building in force. Project members arriving to sign in found their theater sealed and dark. The Cossacks, as they came to be known, guarded the front of the house and the box office; they hovered in the alley outside the dressing rooms with orders to see that no government property was used or removed. This included scenery, equipment, props and costumes: Howard da Silva, who attempted to retrieve his toupee (purchased with federal funds) had it snatched from his head at the stage door and confiscated. But there was one place in the building from which the Cossacks were excluded - the pink powder room in the basement, which now became headquarters in the fight to save The Cradle. Here we lived for the next thirty-six hours, sustained by food and drink brought in by well-wishers from the outside, for we were afraid to leave the theater lest the Cossacks prevent us from returning. Our telephones had not been cut off and we made the most of them.

The authorities had notified the organizations which had bought our previews that these were cancelled. We called them back and urged them to show up in full force. They needed no urging, for most of our advance sales were to organized theater parties of the Left - young and generous and eager to participate in the excitement which the stage alone seemed to offer them in those uncertain times. We were determined to keep the faith with them and the authorities were determined that we should not.

In fact, Orson and I had been so busy asserting our integrity that we hadn't given much thought to the problems of performance. Members of our orchestra had already been notified by their union that, if they wished to perform under the management of Houseman and Welles, they must sign new contracts at full union scale for rehearsal with a two-week guarantee of performance. Since neither Welles nor I had five cents to our names, this was out of the question. The next morning Actors' Equity, in a special meeting of its board, reached a similar decision. Our actors were forbidden to appear for us on stage unless they too were paid in full for three weeks of rehearsal.

We felt betrayed and defeated. We could give a show without scenery and costumes and, if need be, without an orchestra - but not without actors. Marc's despair at this point was ghastly to behold. He who had come within a day of seeing his work presented by the director, the conductor and performers of his choice, amid elegant setting, in a Broadway theater, with a cast of sixty and an orchestra of twenty-eight, had seen these gifts snatched from him one by one, until, now, he was back where he had started a year ago. And the unkindest cut of all came with the realization that the final, fatal blows had been dealt him by those very unions in whose defense the piece had been written.

On June 6, the temperature in New York was in the upper 80s. Midday found us in the powder room, still blithely announcing the opening of The Cradle. We summoned an agent - a small, seedy man in a black felt hat who specialized in distressed theaters. He had a long list of available houses. Five hours later, their number had shrunk to zero. It was mid-summer and not one was available. Every half-hour or so he would look up from the phone we had put at his disposal at our secretary's desk under the lavender mannequin and announce that we had a theater. And each time, a few minutes later, it would turn out not to be so. Once, early in the afternoon, we closed a deal for a house only to discover, as we were about to take possession, that its management was deep in a dispute with the Stagehands' Union and that we would have to cross a picket line to get in. After that the man in the black hat was ordered from the powder room in disgrace. He stayed on, unnoticed, making futile calls and, occasionally, trying to attract our attention.

By midafternoon the press had begun to collect in our powder room. They were invited to wait while we held an emergency meeting in the ladies' toilet next door. Jean Rosenthal (back on the Project after her tour with Leslie Howard) had been sent out with a $10 bill and instructions to acquire a piano. She called to say that she had got one (a battered upright) and what should she do with it? We told her to hire a truck, load the piano onto it, then call for further instructions. After that we turned to face the press - Orson radiating confidence, I looking worried and Marc, recovered from his state of shock, looking pale but determined and eager for martyrdom. We told them that The Cradle Will Rock would be presented that night, as announced, even if Marc had to perform it alone on a piano and sing all the parts. When they inquired where this tour de force would take place we suggested they stay around and find out. Then we went up to talk to the actors who were still waiting, sitting and lying around in the darkened auditorium under the disapproving glare of the Cossacks. I told them of our decision and explained the fine legal point we had evolved in the ladies' toilet: that while they were forbidden by their union to appear on stage, there seemed to be no interdiction against their playing their parts from any other position in the theater. "There is nothing to prevent you from entering whatever theater we find, then getting up from your seats, as U.S. citizens, and speaking your piece when your cue comes," we told them.

Their reaction was mixed. The stalwarts, Will Geer, Howard da Silva and the rest of the non-relief 10-percenters, were enthusiastic. Others - especially our older members and the predominantly Negro chorus - were understandably reluctant to risk the loss of the small weekly income that alone kept them and their dependents from total indigence through a quixotic gesture for a cause which they did not really understand or altogether approve. On these (on the chorus especially) we were careful to exert no pressure or moral suasion. Each had his own personal problems and each must do what seemed sensible or right, regardless of collective or personal loyalty. Amid applause and tears we returned to the powder room, where Archibald MacLeish in a white linen suit had now appeared. The man in the black hat was still in his corner, looking glum and intimidated, and Jean Rosenthal was on the phone again. She reported success: after standing on the corner of Broadway and 37th Street, in the heart of the garment district, for forty minutes, propositioning New Jersey trucks headed home across the river, she had found one, hired it by the hour with its driver and loader and hoisted the piano aboard. Now, what should she do? "Keep riding around," I said, "and call in every fifteen minutes for orders."

Around seven Orson and I came out through the stage door and gave our personal assurance that the show would go on - "Somewhere! Somehow!" By now, sensing excitement, a considerable crowd had assembled on 39th Street; they formed little indignant knots, between which members of the City Projects Council circulated, distributing handbills:

At 7:20, as the swelling crowd began to get restless, several of our actors appeared on the sidewalk and offered a brief preview of the show to come. With their shadows lengthening in the early summer twilight, Hiram Sherman sang "I Wanna Go ter Honolulu" and Will Geer (veteran of many a union picnic and hootenanny) enacted one of Mr. Mister's more repulsive scenes.

Meanwhile, inside the theater, the gloom deepened. In the pink powder room a hopeless silence had fallen, broken only by the uneven whir of a single fan that barely stirred the stale air of the overcrowded basement. It was 7:30 - a half-hour from curtain time; our piano, with Jean Rosenthal on top of it, had been circling the block for almost two hours and the driver was threatening to quit. Clearly, this was the end. After all our big talk, for lack of a theater, The Cradle would not be performed - on this or any other night.

It was then that the miracle occurred. The man in the black felt hat, the down-at-heel theatrical real-estate agent, rose from his corner and moved towards the stair. In the doorway he paused, turned and spoke. It was an exit speech, uttered in a weak, despondent tone. No one, later, could remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it seemed to be that since there was nothing more he could do, he might as well go home. Only he still didn't understand what was wrong with the Venice Theater. With a sigh he turned and started up the stairs. He was already halfway up when he was seized, turned, dragged down, shaken, and howled at. What was he talking about? What Venice Theater? He then explained in a flat, aggrieved voice that for three hours he had been offering us a theater that was open, empty, available, reasonable, unpicketed and in every way suitable to our requirements - but that none had listened to him. He held a rusty key in his hand which, he assured us, would admit us to the Venice Theater on Seventh Avenue at 58th Street at the cost of $100 for the night. The key was snatched from him and he was paid with money borrowed from members of the press.

Within seconds, Abe Feder, our lighting director, was in a cab, headed uptown. Jean Rosenthal, reporting for orders for the fourth time, was told to route her truck at full speed up Seventh Avenue. She got there first and four firemen from the hook-and-ladder station next door helped her to break into the abandoned theater and hoist the piano up onto its deserted stage. Meantime Orson and I went upstairs where our cast was patiently sitting in the auditorium under the disapproving glare of the Cossacks. We told them we had found a theater and invited them to accompany us uptown.

We went out into 39th Street, informed the audience of our move and, since our adopted theater was three times larger than our own, suggested they each invite one or more friends. On the way uptown - a distance of twenty-one city blocks - our audience trebled. They arrived by cab, by bus, by subway and on foot - 2500 of them, including Mrs. Flanagan. A few of our own people stayed behind in the theater, signed out and went quietly to their homes. Others who remained in doubt were willing to risk the voyage; they entered the Venice Theater and took their seats, not knowing whether they would take part in the performance as spectators or performers. Howard da Silva made a final attempt to recapture his government toupee, failed, rushed home to get his own, could not find it, and still managed to be one of the first to arrive on 58th Street. Lehman Engel, our conductor, was among the last to evacuate the Maxine Elliott. Two of the Cossacks, sweating gently in the early summer heat, must have been surprised to see him leaving the buiding in a large overcoat, but failed to search him. If they had, they would have found, clasped against his stomach, the piano and vocal score of The Cradle Will Rock.

By 7:50 the Maxine Elliott was dark. Only a few guards and workmen remained to patrol its emptiness. Orson and I left with Archie MacLeish in someone's white Nash roadster with never a look back at the building in which we had prepared three shows together and opened two. Driving up Broadway through the light summer traffic, MacLeish seemed troubled; he was afraid we were going too far in our insubordination, yet he was reluctant to abandon us. Besides, there was a strong smell of history in the air which he was unwilling to miss.

There were no ticket-takers that night, no ushers and no program. We had changed our curtain-time to 9 p.m. but by 8:40 there was not an empty seat in the house; in defiance of the Fire Department, standees were beginning to clog the back of the theater and the side aisles.

At 9:01, like partners in a vaudeville act, Orson and I made our entrance "in one" in front of a shabby curtain that depicted Mount Vesuvius smoking above the Bay of Naples. We thanked our audience for making the long voyage uptown and related the full history of The Cradle Will Rock. We were not subversives, we insisted, but artists fulfilling a commitment. We told them how the show would have looked and sounded and described the characters they would not be seeing. In conclusion, "We now have the honor to present - with the composer at the piano - The Cradle Will Rock." As we left the stage, the curtain rose on Marc Blitzstein sitting pale, tense but calm at our eviscerated piano.

The Cradle starts cold, without an overture. Behind us, as we dashed into the house, we could hear Marc's voice, setting the scene:

followed by a short vamp that sounded harsh and tinny on our untuned upright.

Then an amazing thing happened. Within a few seconds Marc became aware that he was not singing alone. To his strained tenor voice, a faint, wavering soprano, had been added. It took Feder's hand-held spotlight a few seconds to locate the source of the second voice: it came to rest on the lower stage-right box in which a frail girl in a green dress with red-dyed hair was standing glassy-eyed, stiff with fear, only half-audible at first in that huge theater but gathering strength with every note. It is almost impossible, at this distance in time, to convey the throat-catching, sickeningly exciting quality of that moment or to describe the emotions of gratitude and love with which we saw and heard that slim green figure. Her name was Olive Stanton; she had been cast as "the Moll" almost by default and I knew that she was entirely dependent on the weekly check she was receiving from the WPA.

Years later Hiram Sherman wrote to me: "If Olive had not risen on cue in that box I doubt if the rest of us would have had the nerve to stand up and carry on." But she did - and they did.

The next character to appear was a bit-actor known as "the Gent". Once again Marc was preparing to speak his lines and once again they were taken out of his mouth by a young man with a long nose who rose from his seat somewhere in the front section of the orchestra and addressed the girl in the stage box.

So a scene which, three nights before, had been played in atmospheric blue light, under a prop lamppost, downstage right, was now played in the middle of a half-lit auditorium, by two frightened relief workers standing 30 feet apart. From then on it was a breeze.

Nothing surprised the audience or Marc or any of us after that, as scenes and numbers followed each other in fantastic sequence from one part of the house to another. Blitzstein played half a dozen roles that night, to cover for those who "had not wished to take their lives or, rather, their living wage, into their hands." Other replacements were made spontaneously, on the spot: Hiram Sherman, word-perfect, took over for the Reverend Salvation, whose unctuous part he had never rehearsed, and later repeated this achievement, from an upper box, in the role of Professor Scoot, "an academic prostitute". Scenes were played, at first, wherever the actors happened to be sitting so that the audience found itself turning, as at a tennis match, from one character to another and from one part of the house to the other. Then, as the act progressed and their confidence grew, the actors began to move around, selecting their own locations, improvising their actions, while instinctively communicating with each other from a distance. No one later remembered all that happened. But I do recall that Mr. Mister, Editor Daily and the Mister children sang and danced "I Wanna Go ter Honolulu" in the same center aisle in which Mr. Mister and his stooges later played their big bribery scene. Mrs. Mister did her big scene upstairs in a balcony loge from which she wafted down imaginary "donations" to the Reverend Salvation, who stood in the orchestra floor at the head of the aisle with his back to the stage facing the audience, as did Ella Hammer later for her "Joe Worker" number. Our black chorus - all twenty-eight of them - sat clustered in the third or fourth rows, surrounding Lehman Engel, where they presently provided another of that evening's memorable moments.

Just before leaving 39th Street I had made a last round of the theater, thanked the members of the chorus for their loyalty and urged them not to take any unnecessary chances. It was all the more startling, therefore, in Scene Three, to hear the Reverend Salvation's booming pieties:

answered by an "Amen" reverently intoned by two dozen rich Negro voices. Without rising, taking their beat from Lehman Engel, they sang like angels. Melting into the half-darkness of the crowd, they were not individually indistinguishable, and this gave their responses a particularly moving quality.

Another surprise came when Marc suddenly became aware that, instrumentally, he was no longer performing alone. Of the twenty-eight members of Musicians' local 802, not one was to be seen that night at the Venice - but one was clearly heard. Somewhere, high up in the balcony, Rudy, the accordionist, sat hidden among the audience with his instrument open on his knees, playing along with his composer in passages where he felt it would help.

During the intermission the crowd milling around the jammed lobby and spilling out onto Seventh Avenue was agitated and happy but not overexcited. They kept meeting friends and inquiring how they got there and telling each other how splendid it all was. It took a long time to get them back inside - which was just as well, for Marc was limp with exhaustion.

The second act went like a house afire. The "inflammatory" scenes of The Cradle Will Rock occur cumulatively, towards the end. And then, finally, the showdown: Larry Foreman confronting Mr. Mister and his Liberty Committee in the crowded night court. Only this night they were all on their feet, singing and shouting from all over the theater as they built to their final, triumphal release:

When you can't climb down, and you can't sit still;
That's a storm that's going to last until
The final wind blows ... and when the wind blows ...
The Cradle Will Rock!

There were no "bugles, drums and fifes" that night - only Marc's pounding of an untuned piano before a wrinkled backdrop of the Bay of Naples. As the curtain fell and the actors started to go back to their seats, there was a second's silence - then all hell broke loose.

It was a glamorous evening and the cheering and applause lasted so long that the stagehands demanded an hour's overtime - which we gladly paid. We made the front page of every newspaper in the city and ran for eleven performances at the Venice Theater to packed houses. Then the entire cast returned to the Maxine Elliott where, under WPA regulations that limited absences to twelve days, the Federal Theater had to take them back.

The Books: "Kate Remembered" (A. Scott Berg)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

The publication of this book was an event. It seemed to come from out of nowhere. It appeared only 13 days after Miss Hepburn's death, so it seemed a bit iffy to me at first, like: Was this just thrown together and published to capitalize on her death? But no - it was by A. Scott Berg - one of the great biographers of our day (if you do nothing else, you must read his book about Lindbergh!) - and so that told me that something else was afoot here ... something special. He had been friends with Katharine Hepburn for 20 years - she had come into his life peripherally when he was working on his biography of Maxwell Perkins, and then even more so when he was working on his biography of Samuel Goldwyn (excerpt here). Eventually, a friendship of sorts developed. One that grew and deepened with time. He met her in 1983 and was friends with her until the end. At some point, it seemed to Berg that he realized that she was using him as a sounding-board, she would reflect on things in her life that she never did before (at least not in public) ... Maybe because she trusted him as a writer. Maybe because she knew she needed someone to get down her philosophy on life, her side of things ... and he was the man to do it. Who knows. It was a mysterious relationship - even to Berg ... but for whatever reason, she "let him in". There's a fascinating section where he reports a long conversation they had about Spencer Tracy's alcoholism. Now Katharine Hepburn was quite a dogmatic opinionated person. She was one of those people who got uncomfortable with other people's weaknesses and would say things like, "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going ..." She had zero tolerance for complaining, and she had a dictum for everything. Berg reports how bossy she was. He's a grown man but she's telling him that - how he makes the tea is all wrong - you have to boil the water this long, and you have to dip the tea bag this long - or the whole thing is wrong ... Like that kind of bossiness can be so insulting because it assumes that ... the simplest of things have only ONE way to be done. My first boyfriend was like that. He hovered around me, telling me how to cut vegetables, how to pump gas, the correct way to towel off after going for a swim (I'm not even kidding) ... If you're a doormat in any sense of the word, you will be run over by such people. They will make you lose confidence in yourself. Berg had a lot of patience and also, as a writer, was fascinated by Hepburn ... and by what it was in her that couldn't leave other people alone. She had HER way of doing things, and all else was a deviation. It could be exasperating - but Berg writes about in such a funny and compassionate way. As a writer (especially a biographer) - he is trained to look at such small moments as indicative of larger psychological truths. He doesn't presume to explain Katharine Hepburn. For the most part, he lets her explain herself. So back to Tracy's alcoholism - there's one night when Hepburn and Berg are sitting in her apartment in New York. It's late. They have been talking for hours. Things are getting quiet and open ... and they begin to talk about Spencer Tracy's drinking. Berg hears all the stories - of how abusive Tracy was to her, how she put up with it, protecting him from himself and others - and sees a classic enabler situation. And suddenly, Kate, who never ever liked to seem unsure, asked Berg, "Why do you think Spence drank?" Berg takes a deep breath and talks for two pages - an in-depth analysis of his bystander's opinion. What demons Tracy had, how it played out in his drinking and in his relationship to Hepburn ... For once, Hepburn does not interrupt, or correct, or argue. She just sits there, listening. At the end, nobody speaks, and Hepburn finally realizes she must go to bed. She gets up to leave the room, without a word, and before she exits - she turns to him and says, "You need to write all that down."

I think Berg had a sense that over the course of the friendship, she chose him to be the one to write about her. She knew he was writing it all down - and I can't remember how the arrangement came about - but she asked him to hold back on publishing anything until after her death. He agreed. What a situation! I think, to the end, Hepburn was interested in how she was portrayed - and she knew that whatever was in Berg's book would be okay by her. It would counter-act all of the more salacious books that she knew would be coming in the wake of her death (and they have). I am so curious as to how Berg worked with his publishing company - preparing the manuscript - and then holding it - for how long? ... Had it gone to print, were books sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the news that Hepburn had passed away?

He visited her up until her death. It's weird: she kind of disappeared there, at the end ... My copy of Philadelphia Story has a documentary in the special features, a long interview with Hepburn - following her around in her life - she's in her 80s, I believe ... Her life split between Fenwick (the family home in Connecticut) and her apartment in New York. She paints, she plays bridge with her remaining sibling, she has the same assistant she's had for years ... she is still quite vital. But the decline, when it came, was quick. We didn't hear much more about her. Berg's picture of her during those last years is heart-wrenching. Her mind began to go. Her memory lagged. She would sit in silence at dinner parties she would throw, and it seemed that she was retreating to someplace deep within her own past. She no longer participated. She began to get frazzled. Hepburn? Frazzled? It's a strangely painful image. Katharine Hepburn has been a part of my life for ... well ... my whole life. She's always been there. On Golden Pond came out when I was in junior high and she blew me away. She was not a cowering old lady appaering in small character parts. She still dominated. So to hear of her old and thin and pinched and frazzled is hard. At one point, she called Berg up and said, "I'd like to say goodbye." Berg knew what she was doing, and a part of him resisted. He loved her. Yeah, she's old, but you never are "over" something like that. "Oh well, it's her time to go!" Like - who would act like that? Berg noticed that she had reverted to an almost completely childlike state, her skin stretching smoothly across her face, her eyes emerging, alive and sparkling, like a little kid. She lost the dogmatic edges she had always maintained. She was fading, and she knew it.

The book was frustrating to many. It seemed too quiet, too un-eventful - but I liked it for that reason. It is not strictly a biography. It leaps from present to past. It tells some stories from Hepburn's life, but then it also tells the stories of Berg's personal experiences with her. I was riveted by it all. Her character, her personality, is not an easy one. Berg does not spare her. Yet at the same time, he writes of her with love. We all have foibles and flaws and quirks, and we can only hope that we will find friends who will be kind with us. Forgiving.

I chose an excerpt today that has to do with the beginning of Hepburn's movie career. She had giant success very early on - she was being "groomed" - and it paid off. She wasn't like anyone else. Not just because she wore pants but just because ... she was who she was. Hepburn always knew there would be a place for her in Hollywood, and sometimes she had to create it for herself ... shoving herself back into the game, even when nobody seemed to want her ... It was an act of faith and will, her career. Not to mention "horsepower" (which is the answer she gave to Scott Berg when he asked her why she survived so long in such a brutal career.)

Hepburn won an Oscar (Best Actress) for her role in Morning Glory - a relative newcomer to the scene. It set up her expectations. She was in for some rough times in the late 30s, but early on - she could do no wrong. Morning Glory, Little Women, Alice Adams ... amazing. She was a true contendah.

Here is the excerpt. Berg weaves in his current-day conversations with Hepburn - letting us know her own remembrances of that earlier time. The whole book is like that. It's Hepburn commenting on her own life ... so naturally, you can take it with a grain of salt ... but there is time enough to be "objective" about Hepburn ... In the moment following her death, Berg's memoir appeared - and while it was definitely not the sycophancy of a fanboy - it was deeply loving and respectful, and it fulfilled a need at that time. You don't come across movie stars like Kate Hepburn every day.

And man, I love the last anecdote.

EXCERPT FROM Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

While Christopher Strong rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career - to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.

"I usually don't look through people's desks," Hepburn told me one afternoon - somewhat disingenuously, I thought - "but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman's desk." The thing was a script called Morning Glory, which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoe Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman's secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.

"This must have been written for me," she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part - that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a "comeback" at the age of twenty-seven in What Price Hollywood? (which George Cukor had directed just before A Bill of Divorcement). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoe Akins). "Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway," Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this "thrilling" screenplay ... until she convinced them that she was "born to play this part".

The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn's young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr. performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, filming it before a small audience that included Doug's father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life she had stage fright.

Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in Morning Glory, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called A Church Mouse, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn "copied her totally" in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace - who was determined to become "the finest actress in the world." Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio's prime assets.

Meantime, David Selznick - who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures - had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings, Little Women. He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.

"I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women," Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. "They just couldn't be, they really couldn't be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I'm sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, 'Christopher Columbus! What richness!' and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things." David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.

Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. "Oh, that's such bunk!" she said. "I'm telling you that man never read that book." I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, "So, he didn't deny it. I'm telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn't matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel."

Director and star bickered throughout the production - never about personal matters, only the material - in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, "You haven't read the book." The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, "I'll kill you if you do." As though preordained, she did - and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, "You amateur!" running her off the set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.

Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast - which included Spring Byington as "Marmee" and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate's "sisters" included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn's portrayal as joe that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.

At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood's edge - with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers - RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year, Little Women was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress - though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for Morning Glory.

Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in Morning Glory was "very good" but that it was "tricked up, charming, mugging." In Little Women, however, she said, "I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert." After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that Cavalcade was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year's Best Actress.

The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn't possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she was won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards - "or some asinine answer like that." In truth, she later admitted, "mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win."

From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. "I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose," she confessed. "My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can't think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it's unpardonable, but I do it ... I have no defense."

At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. "If you have a very good part," she said, "you have a very good opportunity ... and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly," she added, "if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I'm terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear." When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. "I mean, if I don't go to the ceremony," she explained, "I can't very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to."

Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called The Lake. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stale-mated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called Spitfire. Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine - an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

The few who ever saw Spitfire rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, "The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work." While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. "A reminder," she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. "Trigger keeps me humble."

The Books: "Kate Remembered" (A. Scott Berg)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

The publication of this book was an event. It seemed to come from out of nowhere. It appeared only 13 days after Miss Hepburn's death, so it seemed a bit iffy to me at first, like: Was this just thrown together and published to capitalize on her death? But no - it was by A. Scott Berg - one of the great biographers of our day (if you do nothing else, you must read his book about Lindbergh!) - and so that told me that something else was afoot here ... something special. He had been friends with Katharine Hepburn for 20 years - she had come into his life peripherally when he was working on his biography of Maxwell Perkins, and then even more so when he was working on his biography of Samuel Goldwyn (excerpt here). Eventually, a friendship of sorts developed. One that grew and deepened with time. He met her in 1983 and was friends with her until the end. At some point, it seemed to Berg that he realized that she was using him as a sounding-board, she would reflect on things in her life that she never did before (at least not in public) ... Maybe because she trusted him as a writer. Maybe because she knew she needed someone to get down her philosophy on life, her side of things ... and he was the man to do it. Who knows. It was a mysterious relationship - even to Berg ... but for whatever reason, she "let him in". There's a fascinating section where he reports a long conversation they had about Spencer Tracy's alcoholism. Now Katharine Hepburn was quite a dogmatic opinionated person. She was one of those people who got uncomfortable with other people's weaknesses and would say things like, "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going ..." She had zero tolerance for complaining, and she had a dictum for everything. Berg reports how bossy she was. He's a grown man but she's telling him that - how he makes the tea is all wrong - you have to boil the water this long, and you have to dip the tea bag this long - or the whole thing is wrong ... Like that kind of bossiness can be so insulting because it assumes that ... the simplest of things have only ONE way to be done. My first boyfriend was like that. He hovered around me, telling me how to cut vegetables, how to pump gas, the correct way to towel off after going for a swim (I'm not even kidding) ... If you're a doormat in any sense of the word, you will be run over by such people. They will make you lose confidence in yourself. Berg had a lot of patience and also, as a writer, was fascinated by Hepburn ... and by what it was in her that couldn't leave other people alone. She had HER way of doing things, and all else was a deviation. It could be exasperating - but Berg writes about in such a funny and compassionate way. As a writer (especially a biographer) - he is trained to look at such small moments as indicative of larger psychological truths. He doesn't presume to explain Katharine Hepburn. For the most part, he lets her explain herself. So back to Tracy's alcoholism - there's one night when Hepburn and Berg are sitting in her apartment in New York. It's late. They have been talking for hours. Things are getting quiet and open ... and they begin to talk about Spencer Tracy's drinking. Berg hears all the stories - of how abusive Tracy was to her, how she put up with it, protecting him from himself and others - and sees a classic enabler situation. And suddenly, Kate, who never ever liked to seem unsure, asked Berg, "Why do you think Spence drank?" Berg takes a deep breath and talks for two pages - an in-depth analysis of his bystander's opinion. What demons Tracy had, how it played out in his drinking and in his relationship to Hepburn ... For once, Hepburn does not interrupt, or correct, or argue. She just sits there, listening. At the end, nobody speaks, and Hepburn finally realizes she must go to bed. She gets up to leave the room, without a word, and before she exits - she turns to him and says, "You need to write all that down."

I think Berg had a sense that over the course of the friendship, she chose him to be the one to write about her. She knew he was writing it all down - and I can't remember how the arrangement came about - but she asked him to hold back on publishing anything until after her death. He agreed. What a situation! I think, to the end, Hepburn was interested in how she was portrayed - and she knew that whatever was in Berg's book would be okay by her. It would counter-act all of the more salacious books that she knew would be coming in the wake of her death (and they have). I am so curious as to how Berg worked with his publishing company - preparing the manuscript - and then holding it - for how long? ... Had it gone to print, were books sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the news that Hepburn had passed away?

He visited her up until her death. It's weird: she kind of disappeared there, at the end ... My copy of Philadelphia Story has a documentary in the special features, a long interview with Hepburn - following her around in her life - she's in her 80s, I believe ... Her life split between Fenwick (the family home in Connecticut) and her apartment in New York. She paints, she plays bridge with her remaining sibling, she has the same assistant she's had for years ... she is still quite vital. But the decline, when it came, was quick. We didn't hear much more about her. Berg's picture of her during those last years is heart-wrenching. Her mind began to go. Her memory lagged. She would sit in silence at dinner parties she would throw, and it seemed that she was retreating to someplace deep within her own past. She no longer participated. She began to get frazzled. Hepburn? Frazzled? It's a strangely painful image. Katharine Hepburn has been a part of my life for ... well ... my whole life. She's always been there. On Golden Pond came out when I was in junior high and she blew me away. She was not a cowering old lady appaering in small character parts. She still dominated. So to hear of her old and thin and pinched and frazzled is hard. At one point, she called Berg up and said, "I'd like to say goodbye." Berg knew what she was doing, and a part of him resisted. He loved her. Yeah, she's old, but you never are "over" something like that. "Oh well, it's her time to go!" Like - who would act like that? Berg noticed that she had reverted to an almost completely childlike state, her skin stretching smoothly across her face, her eyes emerging, alive and sparkling, like a little kid. She lost the dogmatic edges she had always maintained. She was fading, and she knew it.

The book was frustrating to many. It seemed too quiet, too un-eventful - but I liked it for that reason. It is not strictly a biography. It leaps from present to past. It tells some stories from Hepburn's life, but then it also tells the stories of Berg's personal experiences with her. I was riveted by it all. Her character, her personality, is not an easy one. Berg does not spare her. Yet at the same time, he writes of her with love. We all have foibles and flaws and quirks, and we can only hope that we will find friends who will be kind with us. Forgiving.

I chose an excerpt today that has to do with the beginning of Hepburn's movie career. She had giant success very early on - she was being "groomed" - and it paid off. She wasn't like anyone else. Not just because she wore pants but just because ... she was who she was. Hepburn always knew there would be a place for her in Hollywood, and sometimes she had to create it for herself ... shoving herself back into the game, even when nobody seemed to want her ... It was an act of faith and will, her career. Not to mention "horsepower" (which is the answer she gave to Scott Berg when he asked her why she survived so long in such a brutal career.)

Hepburn won an Oscar (Best Actress) for her role in Morning Glory - a relative newcomer to the scene. It set up her expectations. She was in for some rough times in the late 30s, but early on - she could do no wrong. Morning Glory, Little Women, Alice Adams ... amazing. She was a true contendah.

Here is the excerpt. Berg weaves in his current-day conversations with Hepburn - letting us know her own remembrances of that earlier time. The whole book is like that. It's Hepburn commenting on her own life ... so naturally, you can take it with a grain of salt ... but there is time enough to be "objective" about Hepburn ... In the moment following her death, Berg's memoir appeared - and while it was definitely not the sycophancy of a fanboy - it was deeply loving and respectful, and it fulfilled a need at that time. You don't come across movie stars like Kate Hepburn every day.

And man, I love the last anecdote.

EXCERPT FROM Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

While Christopher Strong rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career - to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.

"I usually don't look through people's desks," Hepburn told me one afternoon - somewhat disingenuously, I thought - "but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman's desk." The thing was a script called Morning Glory, which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoe Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman's secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.

"This must have been written for me," she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part - that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a "comeback" at the age of twenty-seven in What Price Hollywood? (which George Cukor had directed just before A Bill of Divorcement). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoe Akins). "Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway," Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this "thrilling" screenplay ... until she convinced them that she was "born to play this part".

The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn's young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr. performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, filming it before a small audience that included Doug's father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life she had stage fright.

Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in Morning Glory, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called A Church Mouse, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn "copied her totally" in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace - who was determined to become "the finest actress in the world." Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio's prime assets.

Meantime, David Selznick - who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures - had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings, Little Women. He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.

"I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women," Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. "They just couldn't be, they really couldn't be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I'm sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, 'Christopher Columbus! What richness!' and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things." David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.

Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. "Oh, that's such bunk!" she said. "I'm telling you that man never read that book." I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, "So, he didn't deny it. I'm telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn't matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel."

Director and star bickered throughout the production - never about personal matters, only the material - in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, "You haven't read the book." The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, "I'll kill you if you do." As though preordained, she did - and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, "You amateur!" running her off the set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.

Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast - which included Spring Byington as "Marmee" and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate's "sisters" included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn's portrayal as joe that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.

At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood's edge - with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers - RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year, Little Women was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress - though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for Morning Glory.

Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in Morning Glory was "very good" but that it was "tricked up, charming, mugging." In Little Women, however, she said, "I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert." After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that Cavalcade was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year's Best Actress.

The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn't possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she was won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards - "or some asinine answer like that." In truth, she later admitted, "mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win."

From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. "I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose," she confessed. "My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can't think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it's unpardonable, but I do it ... I have no defense."

At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. "If you have a very good part," she said, "you have a very good opportunity ... and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly," she added, "if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I'm terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear." When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. "I mean, if I don't go to the ceremony," she explained, "I can't very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to."

Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called The Lake. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stale-mated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called Spitfire. Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine - an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

The few who ever saw Spitfire rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, "The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work." While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. "A reminder," she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. "Trigger keeps me humble."

The Books: "Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir" (Garson Kanin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir, by Garson Kanin

Garson Kanin, screenwriter, director, raconteur, husband of Ruth Gordon, author (did the man ever sleep?) was dear friends with both Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn - not only were they friends, but they worked together often. Kanin wrote this book in 1971 - and apparently Hepburn was furious. Such a private person she was ... to have her dear friend up-end her life like that, and write in such an intimate gossipy way about her life .. She considered it a betrayal. I can't remember if she ever forgave him or not. I'd have to look that up. While I can certainly see her point, and there are moments of the book that make me cringe (imagining that I am Hepburn, reading it) ... some of the anecdotes are worth their weight in gold. Kanin is a brilliant anecdotalist (his book Hollywood is one of the all-time great books about Hollywood - gossipy, hilarious, insightful ... it's a tribute to all of the people he worked with, or knew - you know, people like Garbo, Chaplin, John Barrymore, Sophia Loren ...) Kanin knows how to write, that's clear - his style is casual, not belabored. He knew he was living in amazing times, and he needed to write about it. Spencer Tracy was such a close-lipped gentleman about all aspects of his life - so some of the glimpses we get of him here are just riveting. Especially the glimpses of him as an actor. He's the man who famously said, in response to the question, "What advice would you give young actors?" - "Learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture." This was not a man who talked about his craft, or who intellectualized it ... he just did it and he was one of the most brilliantly natural actors we have ever had in this country. Marlon Brando said he was either bored by most acting, or he felt envious - like when he watched Montgomery Clift - his direct rival. But he only watched two actors so that he could learn from them - he watched two actors so that he could study them - and they were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Tracy (very much like Brando) didn't talk a lot about what he did or how he did it. A genius really can't describe his process. Kanin also gets quotes from his peers - other actors, like Cagney and Bogart - to talk about what it was that made "Spence" so good. Spencer Tracy could also be the biggest son-of-a-bitch who ever walked the earth, and all of his friends say that, too. Kanin doesn't go into the bedroom with Tracy and Hepburn, thank God - I don't know if I want to know THAT much (however - with Bogie and Bacall is another story!! I want to hear everything!) ... but he does give an "intimate memoir" look - not just at their dynamic off-screen (which is fascinating) - but who they were as actors. This, to me, is why the book is invaluable (as pissed off as Hepburn was by it).

I struggled to choose which excerpt, there are so many good sections. One of my favorites has to do with the shoot of Suddenly Last Summer (speaking of Montgomery Clift) - and Hepburn was appalled at how Clift was treated. Clift was still in recovery from the accident that ruined his face and nearly killed him, and he was struggling, in every way. Joe Mankiewicz (the director) and Sam Spiegel (the producer) were openly impatient with him, and there were rumors that Clift would be replaced. He wasn't, but the whole thing created a tense atmosphere on the set. Hepburn could be selfish, she could be annoying, she could be egotistical, but she could never be cruel, and she thought Mankiewicz and Spiegel were cruel - to an actor who was in pain and maybe needed a little lovingkindess to get through the shoot. Here's what happened next:

On her last day of shooting, Mankiewicz came to her and said, "That's it."

She asked, "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

"There's nothing more you're going to need me for?" she asked. "No looping, no pick-up shots, no retakes?"

"I've got it all, Kate," said Mankiewicz, "and it's great. You're great."

"You're sure," she persisted, "that I'm absolutely finished in the picture?"

Mankiewicz grinned his characteristic grin, and said, "Absolutely, Kate. What is all this?"

"I just want to leave you," said Kate, "with this." Whereupon, she spat.

(Precisely where she spat and how she spat, depends on the version one hears. Hers or Joe's, or one of the assorted onlookers'. There is no disagreement, however, as to the fact that she spat.)

She turned, picked up her belongings, and left the set. As she was packing in her dressing room, the phone rang. Sam Spiegel.

"May I see you for a few minutes, Katharine, please?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Kate. "I was coming over, anyway."

"Good."

In his office, she found a grim judge sitting behind the desk.

Spiegel looked at her gravely, and said, "I have heard that you behaved very badly on the set to Joe."

"I behaved very well," said Kate, "while we were making the picture. This was later. If I behaved badly, it was on my own time. Not yours."

"Just the same, "said Spiegel, "I'm shocked. I always thought you were a lady."

"You're going to be more shocked in a minute," she said. "I think you behaved very badly toward Monty. He's a tremendous young actor and he's in a jam and instead of helping him, you tortured him. He's been tortured enough. And this is what I think of you." And she spat again.

I believe it. You know why I believe it? Because of that bit about her making absolutely sure that the shoot was over before she spat at everyone involved. Her professional considerations never totally went out the window.

But I have to say, my favorite anecdote in the entire book has to do with Katharine Hepburn playing Coco Chanel on Broadway. It was a musical, for God's sake. Hepburn was not a young actress, it was in the 1960s - so here she was, taking this enormous risk, at her age ... I just love her for it. I'm not surprised - because she was all about that, but still: I love it. Here she was, taking singing classes and dance classes - knowing that she needed to develop a whole new skill set in order to get through the run of that show.

But the following anecdote just shows, to my mind, her sense of will, her fearlessness, her potential obnoxiousness - and yet how she made it all all right ... she made it seem like those guys would be doing her a favor, and she would SO appreciate it .... It's a great story.

EXCERPT FROM Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir, by Garson Kanin

Kate arrived in New York to prepare for the commencement of Coco rehearsals. She took part, almost immediately, in every department of the production: casting, scenery, costumes, choreography, lighting, make-up, wigs, sound, and, of course, the theater itself.

Experienced professionals know how important the latter element can be, and insist that plays have failed because they were in the wrong theater; too large or too small, or simply not right.

In her long experience, Kate has played virtually every size and shape of theater, but was anxious to become acquainted with the one that had been booked for Coco: the Mark Hellinger on West Fifty-first Street.

Alan Lerner's attachment to it was understandable. His My Fair Lady had occupied it for the longest run in the history of the American musical theater up to that time.

His and Freddie Brisson, Michael Benthall, and Michael Bennett took Kate over to see it a few days after she reached New York.

After walking about on the stage studying the auditorium and walking about the auditorium studying the stage, Kate announced, "It's a fine theater. Perfectly fine, but we can't use it. What else is available?"

The management was speechless. Theaters, especially sizable ones suited for musicals, are not easy to come by in the shrinking world of Broadway. Moreover, the deal for the theater, with its complex terms, had taken months to arrange. The idea of changing theaters was out of the question, but, clearly, the matter would have to be talked out.

Finally Brisson said, "What are you talking about?"

"What's the matter with you people?" Kate responded. "Can't you see anything?"

"Like what?" asked Alan.

"Across the street," said Kate, patiently. "They're beginning the construction of a skyscraper."

"You mean where the Capitol Theater used to be?" asked Alan.

"I don't know," she said. "Right there, across the road - they're excavating now. It means two things - that this theater is going to be very hard to get to, and what's more, it's going to be impossible to play the Wednesday matinee - I don't care how good we are, we can't compete with riveting."

Michael Benthall tried a joke. "Well, we'll just have to be pretty riveting ourselves, won't we?"

Kate said, "Do you mean to tell me there's no other theater in New York? One that isn't right next door to a construction site?"

The discussion continued. Everyone (probably including Kate) knew that they were committed to the Mark Hellinger Theatre, but Kate wanted to make her point.

As it happened, she was correct on both counts, and had, indeed, been the only one to foresee the difficulties ahead.

The Mark Hellinger turned out to be extremely difficult to get to, and the Wednesday matinees were nightmares, or perhaps it is more correct to say daymares.

The company did its best to work against the noise of the neighboring enterprise, but large sections of the audience, particularly those on the left side of the house and toward the rear, had a tough time.

Kate, as Coco, had several numbers in the first act: "The World Belongs to the Young," "Mademoiselle Cliche de Paris", "On the Corner of the Rue Cambon," and "The Money Rings Out Like Freedom," that she was able to belt out successfully, even against the racket. But toward the end of Act One, came a delicate scene with the memory of Coco's father (projected on a screen behind her) during which she sang the moving title song, "Coco".

At the first matinee, Kate found it impossible to perform the number properly in the overwhelming presence of the noise from across the street.

The following Wednesday, she rearranged her schedule, and left for the theatre an hour early. She went directly to the Uris construction site, found the supervisor's trailer, and asked to see him. He was out on the structure somewhere, but Kate made the matter seem so urgent that an assistant led her out onto the job.

Wearing the mandatory hard hat, she found herself facing the supervisor.

"Look here," she shouted, "My name is Katharine Hepburn, and I work across the street."

The astonished supervisor gaped at her. "Holy Smoke!" he said. "What the hell are you doing up here?"

"I have to talk to you," said Kate.

"What?"

"I have to talk to you," she shouted.

"Okay. Come on down. Watch your step. How the hell did you get up here, anyway?"

In the supervisor's trailer, he smoothed his hair and asked, "Can I give you a cup of coffee, Miss Hepburn?"

"Sure," she said, "but I want more than that out of you."

"Go ahead."

"Well, look," she said. "I know you've got to build this building but - on the other hand - we've got to give a show over there - I know we can't ask you to stop - but at least you can help us out - if you want to."

"How?"

"There's one main spot," Kate explained carefully. "It's my 'Coco' number. You know. With papa."

"Oh, sure," he said, mesmerized. (Hepburnized?)

"Well, on Wednesdays," Kate continued, "that number starts at three-oh-five and goes on until about three fourteen - so just for that little piece of time - couldn't you possibly hold the hammers?"

"Well, Jeez, I don't know, Miss Hepburn," said the supervisor.

"Sure you could," urged Kate. "Give them a coffee break or something. I'll pay for the coffee."

"Yeah," he said, "but who'll pay for the time? You know what these guys get, don't you?"

Kate gave him The Hepburn Look, and said softly, "You can do it if you want to."

He took a deep breath, and said, "I don't know, but lemme see what I can figure out here."

"You're sweet," said Kate, and went across the street to make up.

At 3:05 that afternoon, as the introduction to her soft number began, the world outside fell suddenly silent. The audience may not have been aware of the abrupt change, but everyone connected with the Coco company was. The dancers, the singers, the orchestra, and the crew. Some of those who were momentarily free stepped out into the street to see what had happened.

Up and down the structure they saw the workers signaling for silence and looking at their watches. At 3:14 P.M. the applause for the number was all at once augmented by all hell breaking loose across the street.

In the darkness of the scene change, Kate was able to allow the radiant smile, which she had kept hidden in her rib cage, to burst forth on her face.

She went over to thank the men after the matinee, but their day's work had ended, so she made a special trip over the following day to clamber all over the job, thanking her new friends. So it went for week after week. Every Wednesday afternoon at the specified time, the construction gang gave Kate a gift of silence.

Then came the afternoon when a Consolidated Edison crew, not connected with the Uris construction, turned up on the corner to make a cable repair. At 3:05, when the building work stopped, the uninformed Con Edison crew continued.

Whereupon, from every part of the structure, the shouts came raining down.

"Hey, hold the noise, you guys!"

"Shut up down there! Katie's on!"

"Hey, what's a matter with you bastards? Don't you know Katie's doing her number?"

"Quiet!"

In addition to the hollering and yelling, an ad hoc committee went dashing over to enforce the admonition.

At the end of the matinee, Kate was handed a note from the supervisor, explaining that the short burst of noise at the beginning of her number was " ... not us, but that crazy Con Edison which we have now straightened out."

The Books: "Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir" (Garson Kanin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir, by Garson Kanin

Garson Kanin, screenwriter, director, raconteur, husband of Ruth Gordon, author (did the man ever sleep?) was dear friends with both Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn - not only were they friends, but they worked together often. Kanin wrote this book in 1971 - and apparently Hepburn was furious. Such a private person she was ... to have her dear friend up-end her life like that, and write in such an intimate gossipy way about her life .. She considered it a betrayal. I can't remember if she ever forgave him or not. I'd have to look that up. While I can certainly see her point, and there are moments of the book that make me cringe (imagining that I am Hepburn, reading it) ... some of the anecdotes are worth their weight in gold. Kanin is a brilliant anecdotalist (his book Hollywood is one of the all-time great books about Hollywood - gossipy, hilarious, insightful ... it's a tribute to all of the people he worked with, or knew - you know, people like Garbo, Chaplin, John Barrymore, Sophia Loren ...) Kanin knows how to write, that's clear - his style is casual, not belabored. He knew he was living in amazing times, and he needed to write about it. Spencer Tracy was such a close-lipped gentleman about all aspects of his life - so some of the glimpses we get of him here are just riveting. Especially the glimpses of him as an actor. He's the man who famously said, in response to the question, "What advice would you give young actors?" - "Learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture." This was not a man who talked about his craft, or who intellectualized it ... he just did it and he was one of the most brilliantly natural actors we have ever had in this country. Marlon Brando said he was either bored by most acting, or he felt envious - like when he watched Montgomery Clift - his direct rival. But he only watched two actors so that he could learn from them - he watched two actors so that he could study them - and they were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Tracy (very much like Brando) didn't talk a lot about what he did or how he did it. A genius really can't describe his process. Kanin also gets quotes from his peers - other actors, like Cagney and Bogart - to talk about what it was that made "Spence" so good. Spencer Tracy could also be the biggest son-of-a-bitch who ever walked the earth, and all of his friends say that, too. Kanin doesn't go into the bedroom with Tracy and Hepburn, thank God - I don't know if I want to know THAT much (however - with Bogie and Bacall is another story!! I want to hear everything!) ... but he does give an "intimate memoir" look - not just at their dynamic off-screen (which is fascinating) - but who they were as actors. This, to me, is why the book is invaluable (as pissed off as Hepburn was by it).

I struggled to choose which excerpt, there are so many good sections. One of my favorites has to do with the shoot of Suddenly Last Summer (speaking of Montgomery Clift) - and Hepburn was appalled at how Clift was treated. Clift was still in recovery from the accident that ruined his face and nearly killed him, and he was struggling, in every way. Joe Mankiewicz (the director) and Sam Spiegel (the producer) were openly impatient with him, and there were rumors that Clift would be replaced. He wasn't, but the whole thing created a tense atmosphere on the set. Hepburn could be selfish, she could be annoying, she could be egotistical, but she could never be cruel, and she thought Mankiewicz and Spiegel were cruel - to an actor who was in pain and maybe needed a little lovingkindess to get through the shoot. Here's what happened next:

On her last day of shooting, Mankiewicz came to her and said, "That's it."

She asked, "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

"There's nothing more you're going to need me for?" she asked. "No looping, no pick-up shots, no retakes?"

"I've got it all, Kate," said Mankiewicz, "and it's great. You're great."

"You're sure," she persisted, "that I'm absolutely finished in the picture?"

Mankiewicz grinned his characteristic grin, and said, "Absolutely, Kate. What is all this?"

"I just want to leave you," said Kate, "with this." Whereupon, she spat.

(Precisely where she spat and how she spat, depends on the version one hears. Hers or Joe's, or one of the assorted onlookers'. There is no disagreement, however, as to the fact that she spat.)

She turned, picked up her belongings, and left the set. As she was packing in her dressing room, the phone rang. Sam Spiegel.

"May I see you for a few minutes, Katharine, please?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Kate. "I was coming over, anyway."

"Good."

In his office, she found a grim judge sitting behind the desk.

Spiegel looked at her gravely, and said, "I have heard that you behaved very badly on the set to Joe."

"I behaved very well," said Kate, "while we were making the picture. This was later. If I behaved badly, it was on my own time. Not yours."

"Just the same, "said Spiegel, "I'm shocked. I always thought you were a lady."

"You're going to be more shocked in a minute," she said. "I think you behaved very badly toward Monty. He's a tremendous young actor and he's in a jam and instead of helping him, you tortured him. He's been tortured enough. And this is what I think of you." And she spat again.

I believe it. You know why I believe it? Because of that bit about her making absolutely sure that the shoot was over before she spat at everyone involved. Her professional considerations never totally went out the window.

But I have to say, my favorite anecdote in the entire book has to do with Katharine Hepburn playing Coco Chanel on Broadway. It was a musical, for God's sake. Hepburn was not a young actress, it was in the 1960s - so here she was, taking this enormous risk, at her age ... I just love her for it. I'm not surprised - because she was all about that, but still: I love it. Here she was, taking singing classes and dance classes - knowing that she needed to develop a whole new skill set in order to get through the run of that show.

But the following anecdote just shows, to my mind, her sense of will, her fearlessness, her potential obnoxiousness - and yet how she made it all all right ... she made it seem like those guys would be doing her a favor, and she would SO appreciate it .... It's a great story.

EXCERPT FROM Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir, by Garson Kanin

Kate arrived in New York to prepare for the commencement of Coco rehearsals. She took part, almost immediately, in every department of the production: casting, scenery, costumes, choreography, lighting, make-up, wigs, sound, and, of course, the theater itself.

Experienced professionals know how important the latter element can be, and insist that plays have failed because they were in the wrong theater; too large or too small, or simply not right.

In her long experience, Kate has played virtually every size and shape of theater, but was anxious to become acquainted with the one that had been booked for Coco: the Mark Hellinger on West Fifty-first Street.

Alan Lerner's attachment to it was understandable. His My Fair Lady had occupied it for the longest run in the history of the American musical theater up to that time.

His and Freddie Brisson, Michael Benthall, and Michael Bennett took Kate over to see it a few days after she reached New York.

After walking about on the stage studying the auditorium and walking about the auditorium studying the stage, Kate announced, "It's a fine theater. Perfectly fine, but we can't use it. What else is available?"

The management was speechless. Theaters, especially sizable ones suited for musicals, are not easy to come by in the shrinking world of Broadway. Moreover, the deal for the theater, with its complex terms, had taken months to arrange. The idea of changing theaters was out of the question, but, clearly, the matter would have to be talked out.

Finally Brisson said, "What are you talking about?"

"What's the matter with you people?" Kate responded. "Can't you see anything?"

"Like what?" asked Alan.

"Across the street," said Kate, patiently. "They're beginning the construction of a skyscraper."

"You mean where the Capitol Theater used to be?" asked Alan.

"I don't know," she said. "Right there, across the road - they're excavating now. It means two things - that this theater is going to be very hard to get to, and what's more, it's going to be impossible to play the Wednesday matinee - I don't care how good we are, we can't compete with riveting."

Michael Benthall tried a joke. "Well, we'll just have to be pretty riveting ourselves, won't we?"

Kate said, "Do you mean to tell me there's no other theater in New York? One that isn't right next door to a construction site?"

The discussion continued. Everyone (probably including Kate) knew that they were committed to the Mark Hellinger Theatre, but Kate wanted to make her point.

As it happened, she was correct on both counts, and had, indeed, been the only one to foresee the difficulties ahead.

The Mark Hellinger turned out to be extremely difficult to get to, and the Wednesday matinees were nightmares, or perhaps it is more correct to say daymares.

The company did its best to work against the noise of the neighboring enterprise, but large sections of the audience, particularly those on the left side of the house and toward the rear, had a tough time.

Kate, as Coco, had several numbers in the first act: "The World Belongs to the Young," "Mademoiselle Cliche de Paris", "On the Corner of the Rue Cambon," and "The Money Rings Out Like Freedom," that she was able to belt out successfully, even against the racket. But toward the end of Act One, came a delicate scene with the memory of Coco's father (projected on a screen behind her) during which she sang the moving title song, "Coco".

At the first matinee, Kate found it impossible to perform the number properly in the overwhelming presence of the noise from across the street.

The following Wednesday, she rearranged her schedule, and left for the theatre an hour early. She went directly to the Uris construction site, found the supervisor's trailer, and asked to see him. He was out on the structure somewhere, but Kate made the matter seem so urgent that an assistant led her out onto the job.

Wearing the mandatory hard hat, she found herself facing the supervisor.

"Look here," she shouted, "My name is Katharine Hepburn, and I work across the street."

The astonished supervisor gaped at her. "Holy Smoke!" he said. "What the hell are you doing up here?"

"I have to talk to you," said Kate.

"What?"

"I have to talk to you," she shouted.

"Okay. Come on down. Watch your step. How the hell did you get up here, anyway?"

In the supervisor's trailer, he smoothed his hair and asked, "Can I give you a cup of coffee, Miss Hepburn?"

"Sure," she said, "but I want more than that out of you."

"Go ahead."

"Well, look," she said. "I know you've got to build this building but - on the other hand - we've got to give a show over there - I know we can't ask you to stop - but at least you can help us out - if you want to."

"How?"

"There's one main spot," Kate explained carefully. "It's my 'Coco' number. You know. With papa."

"Oh, sure," he said, mesmerized. (Hepburnized?)

"Well, on Wednesdays," Kate continued, "that number starts at three-oh-five and goes on until about three fourteen - so just for that little piece of time - couldn't you possibly hold the hammers?"

"Well, Jeez, I don't know, Miss Hepburn," said the supervisor.

"Sure you could," urged Kate. "Give them a coffee break or something. I'll pay for the coffee."

"Yeah," he said, "but who'll pay for the time? You know what these guys get, don't you?"

Kate gave him The Hepburn Look, and said softly, "You can do it if you want to."

He took a deep breath, and said, "I don't know, but lemme see what I can figure out here."

"You're sweet," said Kate, and went across the street to make up.

At 3:05 that afternoon, as the introduction to her soft number began, the world outside fell suddenly silent. The audience may not have been aware of the abrupt change, but everyone connected with the Coco company was. The dancers, the singers, the orchestra, and the crew. Some of those who were momentarily free stepped out into the street to see what had happened.

Up and down the structure they saw the workers signaling for silence and looking at their watches. At 3:14 P.M. the applause for the number was all at once augmented by all hell breaking loose across the street.

In the darkness of the scene change, Kate was able to allow the radiant smile, which she had kept hidden in her rib cage, to burst forth on her face.

She went over to thank the men after the matinee, but their day's work had ended, so she made a special trip over the following day to clamber all over the job, thanking her new friends. So it went for week after week. Every Wednesday afternoon at the specified time, the construction gang gave Kate a gift of silence.

Then came the afternoon when a Consolidated Edison crew, not connected with the Uris construction, turned up on the corner to make a cable repair. At 3:05, when the building work stopped, the uninformed Con Edison crew continued.

Whereupon, from every part of the structure, the shouts came raining down.

"Hey, hold the noise, you guys!"

"Shut up down there! Katie's on!"

"Hey, what's a matter with you bastards? Don't you know Katie's doing her number?"

"Quiet!"

In addition to the hollering and yelling, an ad hoc committee went dashing over to enforce the admonition.

At the end of the matinee, Kate was handed a note from the supervisor, explaining that the short burst of noise at the beginning of her number was " ... not us, but that crazy Con Edison which we have now straightened out."

The Books: "The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind" (Katharine Hepburn)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, by Katharine Hepburn

This isn't strictly a biography and really should be catalogued in what I call my "Making Of" section - where I have books about the "making of" this or that movie But oh well - I wanted to keep Hepburn's books all together. This book is hysterical. So much fun. If you love African Queen, you must read it! Written in Hepburn's choppy sometimes silly style - almost breathless - she takes us through every step of the filming of that movie. It was ground-breaking at the time. If you think about it, African Queen COULD have been filmed in America ... in the same way that Gunga Din, which takes place in Afghanistan and India, was filmed in America. Most of the action takes place on the boat ... do a little rear projection of a river ... pop in some shots of a jungle ... and there you are in Africa. But John Huston loved to go on location. He was an easily-bored adventurer, and loved to set himself sometimes insurmountable challenges. He also loved to hunt big game. So Africa was where the entire cast and crew went. The location was mainly in what was then known as "The Belgian Congo" - on the Ruiki River outside Ponthierville. It was a wild west type situation. There was nothing set up for them, no studio, no accommodations - they had to figure it out as they went. The best part of the whole shoot is that in order to get to the location, every day the cast and crew had to take a barge down the river (in the same way that Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer had to travel down the river). Hepburn learned very early on that she needed to take care of herself. There was no studio there, no "handlers" ... She became her own dressmaker, her own hairdresser (the dampness of the air wreaked havoc with her hair, she had to figure out herself what to do with it) ... As the only woman on the set, she also had to figure out her own dressing situation. There were no dressing rooms. There wasn't even a mirror. So Kate found a full-length mirror in one of the huts they were staying in, and every day - when they would all trek down the river - she would carry that mirror, in the barge, to set up in the jungle ... so she could deal with her costume, her hair, whatever she needed. This is one of my favorite photographs of Katharine Hepburn ever:

Ah, the glamour of Hollywood.

Hepburn did not know Bogie very well at the time, and didn't know Lauren Bacall at all (who came along for the entire shoot) ... but they became best friends over the course of the shooting. There's a very funny story of Hepburn and Bacall strolling into one of the huts, on their first day in Africa, and then coming running out screaming at the top of their lungs because the place was overrun by red ants. The bugs were an issue. On her first night there, Bacall walked into the bathroom and saw a huge scorpio on the wall. She freaked OUT. Bogart came in and killed it and then gave her a very stern talking-to (this is in one of Bacall's autobiographies). Basically saying, "Baby, (his pet name for her) this can't go on. We're in Africa and there are going to be huge bugs. No more screaming. Suck it up." Bacall sucked it up. There are photos of her, in her pajamas, sitting and having coffee with Bogart on the porch of their tiny hut - and she looks cool and glamorous and like she belongs in Africa. She saw many huge bugs, and never screamed about one again. Hepburn tells a great story about feeling like she had to throw up and running to the latrine, only to find a huge black snake curled around the port-a-potty toilet. You know, it was insane. And in the middle of all this insanity, they had to film a movie.

Hepburn tells great stories about John Huston (one of my favorites which is in the excerpt below), and how he seemed to be in it for the experience, not just for the making of the movie. This drove Hepburn a little bit batty, because she wanted to have script conferences, and guidance from her director. Huston didn't really work that way - but as you can see (in the excerpt below) it's not because he wasn't focused on the details. He was more focused on the details than anyone on that set - even Hepburn - and when he honed in and told her what he wanted from her in the part ... well, she basically could do no wrong after that. Just do what he said. Appearances can be deceiving. Huston was a big brash crazy man, who stayed up all night, drinking, gambling ... but when it came time to make decisions for the film, he had a laser-sharp focus. It took Hepburn a bit of time to realize that. She was frustrated with him putting her off, and not wanting to chat with her ... but, as you can see, he was up to something else. He said one or two key things ... and then just left it to percolate with Hepburn, knowing that her talent would do the rest. That is the mark of a great actor's director. Don't say too much, goddammit.

Bogart hated Africa. He rolled his eyes at Huston's passion for this experience. He wanted to be home in California. He missed his boat (Bogart was a committed sailor). He missed ... civilization, frankly. He basically endured the shoot - which is so amazing when you see the end results. He looks like he was born in Africa. Charlie Allnut looks and acts like a native. But Bogart hated adventure, hated getting dirty, hated not having amenities ... He was a crank. Hepburn loved him.

Her book is indispensable. She knew she was having an experience of a lifetime, and so when she was asked to put her thoughts into book-form, she leapt at the chance. Her memories - of standing in the tiny barge, gripping her full-length mirror, her hair up in curlers - surrounded by swarms of bugs ... are just wonderful, and to me it really adds to the lunatic enjoyment of that film to know the circumstances under which it was shot.

I also have to say: I loved how Hepburn is so open about the whole bathroom issue. There were no real toilets, just open latrines in the middle of the jungle ... that had to be shared by the entire cast and crew. Hepburn looked around on her first day on location and immediately thought of "bowel movements" (hahaha) and how she was going to negotiate all of this. She writes something like, "Bowels may not be the most polite topic, but they are extremely important."

Here's an excerpt. This is early on in the shoot. It ends with my favorite anecdote of John Huston as a director. Hepburn got along with a lot of people, she was not a prissy actress - she was game for pretty much anything, even falling off a brontosaurus skeleton ... but Huston made her nervous at first. She feared her own performance would be lost in the sheer drama of going to Africa. Would he be her director? Would he be able to help her play a scene (should she need the help)? Any time she tried to pull him aside to talk about the script, he would say, "Tomorrow, honey ... let's talk tomorrow ..."

Finally, a breakthrough in the relationship:

EXCERPT FROM The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, by Katharine Hepburn

It's hard to say anything about the natives and whether they work hard and how they were treated and what was their situation here or there. It goes from good to bad. As we go - they go. There are tremendous problems of which we have not the vaguest comprehension. Then or now. A real lack of education is a tough thing to combat. And the country is so big and transportation is so difficult. It's tough too on the whites who moved out there to supposedly earn a fortune on coffee. They had paid a tremendous price and lost. The country is like a great sponge - it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black of white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.

The day was clear - we started work. This meant that the five autos and trucks carried us in loads the three and a half miles through Biondo to the edge of the Ruiki River. There we unloaded everything. Carried it down the hill onto the raft or onto the Queen or onto the administrator's launch. Then we went by these boats two and a half miles or so up the river to our working location. There we unloaded the first day, as we were to shoot on land. The rest of the time we were shooting on the Queen or on the various fake parts of the Queen which had been built on the raft - the "mock-ups" as I said before. It was easier to photograph us this way, as the Technicolor camera was huge and we needed lights and reflectors and with sound we have to have a lot of room and a lot of people. If we were doing a shot on the raft where the boat was supposedly moving, the raft would be towed by the administrator's launch and the African Queen. As I've explained, the Ruiki River is very curving - the raft very unwieldy - a big square. When the raft was towed too fast, the pirogues underneath used to fill up with water and we'd start to sink. Or we'd be going around a curve and the raft would not follow around the curve but would continue in a straight line toward the bank and its dense overhanging foliage. John would scream - Bogie and I would jump - and the boiler would be tipped over, or nearly. The canopy would be torn off. The camera or lamps or whatever was caught by the overhanging shrubbery on the banks. Or we would be going along nicely - hit a submerged log and catch on it. Or the sun would go in. Or it would rain. The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare. And there was always the uncertain factor of Bogie and me and whether John thought we'd done a scene well. Or the engine on the Queen would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets. Or a stray pirogue would suddenly appear in the shot. If it was a stationary shot there were many of the same problems but also the question of whether the sound had picked up the generator noise. Technical problems galore and no chairs - no dressing rooms - no toilet - hot ginger ale and fruit juice and beer - the problem of sending out lunch for forty people. This became Betty Bogart's department and a wonderful job she did. But the lunch might be very late, for we had to send one of our two launches down to pick it up and often needed them in the shot. Sometimes when we were working in the middle of the stream we couldn't tie up for hours. The men solved this problem with great ease - but it was a bit tough on the ladies ...

However --

Making The African Queen was great fun. John Huston - Bogie and Betty and Peter - were great fun to be with. And the location in Africa was a first for all of us.

The temperature in both Uganda and the Belgian Congo is always about eighty to eighty-five degrees. Almost on the Equator. Nothing ever dried.

The weather is beautiful. A clear blue sky which can cloud over very quickly in a most ominous fashion. And it pours rain. To hell with the actors. Protect the camera! Protect the sound! Then just as suddenly - it will clear. It will shine. And, having scurried for shelter, we would unscurry ourselves and get on with the work. But unfortunately the ground, after a rain, was immediately soft mud.

Now, speaking of mud - the very first scene to be shot was burying my brother - the preacher - Robert Morley - on a hillside. I hesitated ... Remember, I was still the wardrobe woman. Vi Murray wouldn't arrive until the third day of shooting.

The clothes I carried in an aluminum trunk, and then hung them on hangers on whatever tree was available.

"Kneel down, dear," said John Huston.

"I'll be filthy," I answered.

"Yes, dear - kneel down - I think it would be a good idea if you knelt down next to the grave and planted a rose."

Good grief, I thought.

He had decided to bury Robert in the most difficult spot, all the way up a hill - slip - slip - slide up it - down it. The front of the linen skirt - a light light washed-out tan - would get mud on it. What a mess. Fool directors. Impractical to a moronic degree.

"What are you going to do about that hat brim, Katie?"

"What?"

"Fix the hat brim, dear - it's dripping. It's covering your face."

"Yes," I answered, "but it's the damp that's dipping it - it's losing its shape and ..."

"Yes, that's what I mean. Fix it," he said.

I looked at the makeup man, George Frost. "What can we do?"

"Starch?"

"Are you kidding? Where?"

Yes, where? I thought. I thought.

"I know - rice water - sticky - Just a minute, John."

George and I headed for the jungle - we could see smoke rising from somewhere - a hut? Yes. We knocked - went in - there it was, the inevitable pot of rice boiling away - the basic diet of the Congo. We pointed - held out money - bought it - we let it boil low and sticky, then patted the liquid into the brim. By now the sun was out again - we let the hat dry. It worked! Down the hill we ran.

"John, it works! The brim is stiff! Hurry!"

We got the shot. Buried Morley without a ruffle. Fine day's work. I took the clothes back to the camp and the mud brushed out so that you noticed nothing. After that when I was wearing the hat we carried rice. And - thank heaven, the wardrobe woman, Vi Murray, had finally arrived. She did have to work under very primitive conditions, heating her iron by filling it with hot coals. The material of which my suit was made was a heavy sort of fake linen. It never showed the dirt. You could not tell whether it was wet or dry. Brilliant Doris Langley Moore. A great designer! Just as important - she had common sense.

The eating of lunch. I had a can with a top. In it I carried a cut-up pineapple. I opened the can. Bees would swarm from nowhere. I'd leave the can with dripping around the top and move off about fifty feet and eat my slice while the bees had their sip. I did this not because of the food - that was O.K. But the dish problem gave me pause. I saw them wash off the dishes in the Ruiki and hand them to the new customer. I eat things unwashed. And I eat things which have dropped on the floor. But here I thought twice. Stick to the pineapple and English tinned biscuits and cookies.

I had no dressing room. To change, if the administrator's launch wasn't handy, I'd go off into the trees. As for the bathroom, Betty and I would go off into the trees. Often pursued by the curious natives, whom we would shoo away. Finally I thought I really should have a decent dressing room. They built me a hut on its own private raft. But dragging it, a square, up the river proved to be totally impractical - That Katie! After a few times it was abandoned.

The only horror after the first day's work, besides the difficulty of getting up the river to the location, the hat and the minor personal discomforts, was the discovery on the second day of work that we didn't have sufficient cable to keep the generator boat far enough upriver so that we couldn't hear it. It had to be at least three bends away unless the Queen's engine was covering it. This caused no worry to John, but it nearly gave Sam a stroke. I don't blame him. John and saving money didn't mix. John was happy to wait for cable - gave him time to use his hunting license. What an irresponsible child - poor Sam.

It was during this pause that John came one morning to my hut.

“May I have a cup of coffee?”

“Yes, of course – what?”

“Well – I don’t want to influence you. But incidentally … that was great, that scene, burying Robert. And of course you had to look solemn – serious … Yes, of course – you were burying your brother. You were sad. But, you know, this is an odd tale – I mean, Rosie is almost always facing what is for her a serious situation. And she’s a pretty serious-minded lady. And I wondered – well – let me put it this way – have you by any chance seen any movies of – you know – newsreels – of Mrs. Roosevelt – those newsreels where she visited the soldiers in the hospitals?”

“Yes, John – yes – I saw one. Yes.”

“Do you remember, Katie dear, that lovely smile - ?”

“Yes, John – yes – I do.”

“Well, I was wondering. You know, thinking ahead of our story. And thinking of your skinny little face – a lovely little face, dear. But skinny. And those famous hollow cheeks. And that turned-down mouth. You know – when you look serious – you do look rather – well, serious. And it just occurred to me – now, take Rosie – you know – you are a very religious – serious-minded – frustrated woman. Your brother just dead. Well, now, Katie – you’re going to go through this whole adventure before the falls and before love raises its … Well, you know what I mean – solemn.

“Then I thought of how to remedy that. She’s used to handling strangers as her brother’s hostess. And you ‘put on’ a smile. Whatever the situation. Like Mrs. Roosevelt – she felt she was ugly – she thought she looked better smiling – so she … Chin up. The best is yet to come – onward ever onward … The society smile.”

A long pause.

“You mean – yes – I see. When I pour out the gin I – yes – yes – when I …”

“Well,” he said, getting up to go. He’d planted the seed. “Think it over .. Perhaps it might be a useful …”

He was gone.

I sat there.

That is the goddamndest best piece of direction I have ever heard. Now, let's see ...

Well. he just told me exactly how to play this part. Oh-h-h-h-h, lovely thought. Such fun. I was his from there on in.

The Books: "The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind" (Katharine Hepburn)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, by Katharine Hepburn

This isn't strictly a biography and really should be catalogued in what I call my "Making Of" section - where I have books about the "making of" this or that movie But oh well - I wanted to keep Hepburn's books all together. This book is hysterical. So much fun. If you love African Queen, you must read it! Written in Hepburn's choppy sometimes silly style - almost breathless - she takes us through every step of the filming of that movie. It was ground-breaking at the time. If you think about it, African Queen COULD have been filmed in America ... in the same way that Gunga Din, which takes place in Afghanistan and India, was filmed in America. Most of the action takes place on the boat ... do a little rear projection of a river ... pop in some shots of a jungle ... and there you are in Africa. But John Huston loved to go on location. He was an easily-bored adventurer, and loved to set himself sometimes insurmountable challenges. He also loved to hunt big game. So Africa was where the entire cast and crew went. The location was mainly in what was then known as "The Belgian Congo" - on the Ruiki River outside Ponthierville. It was a wild west type situation. There was nothing set up for them, no studio, no accommodations - they had to figure it out as they went. The best part of the whole shoot is that in order to get to the location, every day the cast and crew had to take a barge down the river (in the same way that Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer had to travel down the river). Hepburn learned very early on that she needed to take care of herself. There was no studio there, no "handlers" ... She became her own dressmaker, her own hairdresser (the dampness of the air wreaked havoc with her hair, she had to figure out herself what to do with it) ... As the only woman on the set, she also had to figure out her own dressing situation. There were no dressing rooms. There wasn't even a mirror. So Kate found a full-length mirror in one of the huts they were staying in, and every day - when they would all trek down the river - she would carry that mirror, in the barge, to set up in the jungle ... so she could deal with her costume, her hair, whatever she needed. This is one of my favorite photographs of Katharine Hepburn ever:

Ah, the glamour of Hollywood.

Hepburn did not know Bogie very well at the time, and didn't know Lauren Bacall at all (who came along for the entire shoot) ... but they became best friends over the course of the shooting. There's a very funny story of Hepburn and Bacall strolling into one of the huts, on their first day in Africa, and then coming running out screaming at the top of their lungs because the place was overrun by red ants. The bugs were an issue. On her first night there, Bacall walked into the bathroom and saw a huge scorpio on the wall. She freaked OUT. Bogart came in and killed it and then gave her a very stern talking-to (this is in one of Bacall's autobiographies). Basically saying, "Baby, (his pet name for her) this can't go on. We're in Africa and there are going to be huge bugs. No more screaming. Suck it up." Bacall sucked it up. There are photos of her, in her pajamas, sitting and having coffee with Bogart on the porch of their tiny hut - and she looks cool and glamorous and like she belongs in Africa. She saw many huge bugs, and never screamed about one again. Hepburn tells a great story about feeling like she had to throw up and running to the latrine, only to find a huge black snake curled around the port-a-potty toilet. You know, it was insane. And in the middle of all this insanity, they had to film a movie.

Hepburn tells great stories about John Huston (one of my favorites which is in the excerpt below), and how he seemed to be in it for the experience, not just for the making of the movie. This drove Hepburn a little bit batty, because she wanted to have script conferences, and guidance from her director. Huston didn't really work that way - but as you can see (in the excerpt below) it's not because he wasn't focused on the details. He was more focused on the details than anyone on that set - even Hepburn - and when he honed in and told her what he wanted from her in the part ... well, she basically could do no wrong after that. Just do what he said. Appearances can be deceiving. Huston was a big brash crazy man, who stayed up all night, drinking, gambling ... but when it came time to make decisions for the film, he had a laser-sharp focus. It took Hepburn a bit of time to realize that. She was frustrated with him putting her off, and not wanting to chat with her ... but, as you can see, he was up to something else. He said one or two key things ... and then just left it to percolate with Hepburn, knowing that her talent would do the rest. That is the mark of a great actor's director. Don't say too much, goddammit.

Bogart hated Africa. He rolled his eyes at Huston's passion for this experience. He wanted to be home in California. He missed his boat (Bogart was a committed sailor). He missed ... civilization, frankly. He basically endured the shoot - which is so amazing when you see the end results. He looks like he was born in Africa. Charlie Allnut looks and acts like a native. But Bogart hated adventure, hated getting dirty, hated not having amenities ... He was a crank. Hepburn loved him.

Her book is indispensable. She knew she was having an experience of a lifetime, and so when she was asked to put her thoughts into book-form, she leapt at the chance. Her memories - of standing in the tiny barge, gripping her full-length mirror, her hair up in curlers - surrounded by swarms of bugs ... are just wonderful, and to me it really adds to the lunatic enjoyment of that film to know the circumstances under which it was shot.

I also have to say: I loved how Hepburn is so open about the whole bathroom issue. There were no real toilets, just open latrines in the middle of the jungle ... that had to be shared by the entire cast and crew. Hepburn looked around on her first day on location and immediately thought of "bowel movements" (hahaha) and how she was going to negotiate all of this. She writes something like, "Bowels may not be the most polite topic, but they are extremely important."

Here's an excerpt. This is early on in the shoot. It ends with my favorite anecdote of John Huston as a director. Hepburn got along with a lot of people, she was not a prissy actress - she was game for pretty much anything, even falling off a brontosaurus skeleton ... but Huston made her nervous at first. She feared her own performance would be lost in the sheer drama of going to Africa. Would he be her director? Would he be able to help her play a scene (should she need the help)? Any time she tried to pull him aside to talk about the script, he would say, "Tomorrow, honey ... let's talk tomorrow ..."

Finally, a breakthrough in the relationship:

EXCERPT FROM The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, by Katharine Hepburn

It's hard to say anything about the natives and whether they work hard and how they were treated and what was their situation here or there. It goes from good to bad. As we go - they go. There are tremendous problems of which we have not the vaguest comprehension. Then or now. A real lack of education is a tough thing to combat. And the country is so big and transportation is so difficult. It's tough too on the whites who moved out there to supposedly earn a fortune on coffee. They had paid a tremendous price and lost. The country is like a great sponge - it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black of white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.

The day was clear - we started work. This meant that the five autos and trucks carried us in loads the three and a half miles through Biondo to the edge of the Ruiki River. There we unloaded everything. Carried it down the hill onto the raft or onto the Queen or onto the administrator's launch. Then we went by these boats two and a half miles or so up the river to our working location. There we unloaded the first day, as we were to shoot on land. The rest of the time we were shooting on the Queen or on the various fake parts of the Queen which had been built on the raft - the "mock-ups" as I said before. It was easier to photograph us this way, as the Technicolor camera was huge and we needed lights and reflectors and with sound we have to have a lot of room and a lot of people. If we were doing a shot on the raft where the boat was supposedly moving, the raft would be towed by the administrator's launch and the African Queen. As I've explained, the Ruiki River is very curving - the raft very unwieldy - a big square. When the raft was towed too fast, the pirogues underneath used to fill up with water and we'd start to sink. Or we'd be going around a curve and the raft would not follow around the curve but would continue in a straight line toward the bank and its dense overhanging foliage. John would scream - Bogie and I would jump - and the boiler would be tipped over, or nearly. The canopy would be torn off. The camera or lamps or whatever was caught by the overhanging shrubbery on the banks. Or we would be going along nicely - hit a submerged log and catch on it. Or the sun would go in. Or it would rain. The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare. And there was always the uncertain factor of Bogie and me and whether John thought we'd done a scene well. Or the engine on the Queen would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets. Or a stray pirogue would suddenly appear in the shot. If it was a stationary shot there were many of the same problems but also the question of whether the sound had picked up the generator noise. Technical problems galore and no chairs - no dressing rooms - no toilet - hot ginger ale and fruit juice and beer - the problem of sending out lunch for forty people. This became Betty Bogart's department and a wonderful job she did. But the lunch might be very late, for we had to send one of our two launches down to pick it up and often needed them in the shot. Sometimes when we were working in the middle of the stream we couldn't tie up for hours. The men solved this problem with great ease - but it was a bit tough on the ladies ...

However --

Making The African Queen was great fun. John Huston - Bogie and Betty and Peter - were great fun to be with. And the location in Africa was a first for all of us.

The temperature in both Uganda and the Belgian Congo is always about eighty to eighty-five degrees. Almost on the Equator. Nothing ever dried.

The weather is beautiful. A clear blue sky which can cloud over very quickly in a most ominous fashion. And it pours rain. To hell with the actors. Protect the camera! Protect the sound! Then just as suddenly - it will clear. It will shine. And, having scurried for shelter, we would unscurry ourselves and get on with the work. But unfortunately the ground, after a rain, was immediately soft mud.

Now, speaking of mud - the very first scene to be shot was burying my brother - the preacher - Robert Morley - on a hillside. I hesitated ... Remember, I was still the wardrobe woman. Vi Murray wouldn't arrive until the third day of shooting.

The clothes I carried in an aluminum trunk, and then hung them on hangers on whatever tree was available.

"Kneel down, dear," said John Huston.

"I'll be filthy," I answered.