The Sheila Variations

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)

It's More Fun to Play a Bad Girl

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.

Jumping into the Fear

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.

Getting Myself Back

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.

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: "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: "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:

WALT DISNEY presents
Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills
in
THE PARENT TRAP
Starring MAUREEN O'HARA and BRIAN KEITH

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:

I'll never tell.

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: "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 w