The Sheila Variations

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderful books. Wonderful actress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Shelley: Also known as Shirley, by Shelley Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderful books. Wonderful actress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scene went very well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's bothering you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"That's right," I answered.

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

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

"He loved it! David loved it!"

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scene went very well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's bothering you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"That's right," I answered.

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

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

"He loved it! David loved it!"

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't that absolutely gorgeous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't that absolutely gorgeous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onto the excerpt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Kerr,
I'm feeling a little punch drunk from the feared, but not fully anticipated attack at your hands and a quorum of your colleagues. But I would like to attempt to get a few things off my chest in reply. What I would like to know is, don't you see that "Camino" is a concentrate, a distillation of the world and the time we live in?

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onto the excerpt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Kerr,
I'm feeling a little punch drunk from the feared, but not fully anticipated attack at your hands and a quorum of your colleagues. But I would like to attempt to get a few things off my chest in reply. What I would like to know is, don't you see that "Camino" is a concentrate, a distillation of the world and the time we live in?

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready? Let's go.

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

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

Next.

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

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

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

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

Next:

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

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready? Let's go.

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

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

Next.

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

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

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

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

Next:

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

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascinating.

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

Remarkable.

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

EXCERPT FROM Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's my review of the play.

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

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

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

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

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

Good for her, man. Good for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: "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 (although she had not yet played that role at the time Watts imagined her into it.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here she is with Irving:

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

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

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

Here is Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth:

Stunningly beautiful, isn't it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's a wonderful writer.

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

EXCERPT FROM The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My father! Methinks I see my father."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!'

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

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

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

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

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

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But all it took was one playwright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let me back up a bit.

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

Lyle Leverich writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love Randy Echols.

And so - curtain-time approaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurette Taylor never lost an opportunity to divert the praise that was being heaped upon her to that "nice little guy," Tennessee Williams. She was always quick to remind her admirers that it was he, not she, who had written the lines that gave The Glass Menagerie its special power and beauty. And she told Tennessee, "It's a beautiful - a wonderful - a great play!"

For his part, Tennessee Williams always said that, as much as he regarded Laurette Taylor a personal friend, he never ceased to be in awe of her. "She had such a creative mind," he once remarked. "Something magical happened with Laurette. I used to stand backstage. There was a little peephole in the scenery, and I could be just about three feet from her, and when the lights hit her face, suddenly twenty years would drop off. An incandescent thing would happen in her face; it was really supernatural."

What was perhaps most extraordinary about The Glass Menagerie as a theatrical event was the meeting of these two great artists, one ending her career and the other beginning his. On that cold night of December 26, 1944, the convergence of two enormous theatre talents made theatre history. The performance itself became legendary, and the play became a classic in the literature of the American theatre.

The show continues its run in Chicago. Laurette Taylor has become the toast of the town. New York bigwigs fly in to see this new extraordinary show, and to see her performance, in particular. It is unclear at first, whether or not it will move on to New York. New York is the center of the universe. "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere..." Being a huge success in Chicago was wonderful and gratifying, for this sixty-year-old actress whom everyone had given up on for years. But she knew that ... Manhattan and the theatre audience and theatre critics in Manhattan were other animals altogether. Her anxiety grows.

As much as she was being lionized in Chicago and was enjoying it, Laurette knew the fawning for what it was: skittering leaves in the Windy City. Offstage now, she was becoming bored and edgy and more and more in need of a drink. Tom [Tennessee Williams] felt that what she actually needed was the seclusion of her own apartment and the protection of her young actress friend, Eloise. One who could understand Laurette's quicksilver disposition was Helen Hayes, then in Chicago playing in Harriet. She remembered Laurette saying over and over like an incantation, " 'I'm going to break this witch's curse.' "

Hayes said that Laurette was one of her idols and that they had been friends for a long time. "Harriet was closed on Sunday nights, and that was when I saw The Glass Menagerie. The play and Laurette were simply superb. Most nights after work, I would join her and Tennessee (they were very close) and Tony Ross, too, and we would go to their favorite bar. Laurette would order a double scotch, and when she saw my eyes widen, she reassured me that if she ordered a second drink, her deceased husband, Hartley, would come down and gently tap her on the shoulder. Being Irish, she believed that to be perfectly true."

Hayes remembered that Laurette's career had nose-dived and that hers was "a daring comeback attempt at age sixty ... One night the phone was ringing when I returned to my suite at the Ambassador. It was Laurette. 'I can't go on tomorrow,' she said in despair. 'My throat hurts, and I'm losing my voice. If I don't go on, everyone will think I'm drunk. If they say I'm drunk, I will get drunk and stay drunk till I die.' Her cry for help galvanized me." Hayes said that she always carried an electric steam kettle when she went on tour, to which she could add medicine. 'It had been helpful when I came down with bronchitis or laryngitis. I told Laurette I would come right away with the kettle ... I taxied downtown to the Sherman House. I stayed with her through most of the night, making sure she was breathing properly ... the next evening she gave a magnificent performance."

That image kills me. Helen Hayes steaming Laurette Taylor. Jesus.

The buzz around the show grew.

The word had spread to Broadway and Hollywood, and the wagers were on: Would she or would she not make it back? Everyone in the Chicago company was now, by mid-February, plainly nervous. The more Laurette was surrounded by flattery and the excitement of prominent visitors, the greater was the strain on her to keep from joining in the carouse around her. The marvelously witty and stylish actress Ina Claire was in the audience every night, and Tom wrote Audrey: "Everybody stops off here between Hollywood and New York, so our social life is terrific. We've had Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Katherine Helpburn, Terry Helburn, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic Lindsay and Crouse, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Luther Adler and God knows what all! Everybody has been favorable except Maxwell Anderson. He didn't like it."...

Katherine Hepburn's enthusiasm for The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, was such that she went straightway to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, saying that the studio should buy the play, assign George Cukor to direct, cast her as Laura and Spencer Tracy as the gentleman caller, and, above all, to capture on film Laurette's incomparable performance. She was to say later that Amanda Wingfield was Tennessee's "most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he has ever created."

But the project never came about, and so we will never know what Taylor's performance actually looked like. We can only take the words of all of the people who saw it as truth.

The play finally moves to New York. They uproot from Chicago, the glorious snowy town which had put Tennessee Williams on the map, made him a star, the town that catapulted Laurette Taylor, now a 60 year old woman, back into the limelight, after 40 years.

The pressure on the company is enormous. The show is going to be done at the Playhouse Theatre.

Laurette was well aware that both her disgrace in Alice and her comeback in Outward Bound had taken place on this same Playhouse stage. Across the street was the Cort Theatre, where her career had begun in the title role of Peg O' My Heart. She had much to look back upon, but the present confronting her was virtually unendurable. Back in her apartment, she found that her impulse was not to leave it and to seek escape in alcohol, but she also recognized this as an enemy that could bring upon her a terrible, final disagrace. In the hours before the curtain was to rise, she was under the watchful care of Eloise Sheldon, who had taken time off from her role in Harvey to be close to her.

The Glass Menagerie was scheduled to open on Saturday, March 31, Easter eve - a week after Tom's thirty-fourth birthday ... and the day before Laurette's sixty-first. Born a few weeks before Easter and reared in the symbolism of the Christian church, Tom saw this season as a special one, and he used the passage from crucifixion to resurrection as a constant theme in his work.

And so, opening night arrives. Everyone who is anyone showed up. It was a star-studded evening. Every powerhouse in town was in the audience.

That afternoon, there had been a technical run-through and the usual chaotic dress rehearsal. Audrey wrote:

I don't remember where the author was that last afternoon but I shan't ever forget sitting in an unairconditioned Playhouse Theatre. There was a frenetic veiling over everything - and everybody. The actors paced nervously before the run-through began. The light technicians tinkered with never-ending light cues and most of them came out just a little bit wrong. Having played their roles for months in Chicago meant absolutely nothing. This was the day of the New York opening. This was it. I kept remembering Liebling's remark, "You're only as good as the night they catch you."

Audrey recalled that when Laurette began her opening scene, she seemed under control "but after a few words in recognizable anguish she said, 'I'm sorry, I have to leave the stage. I'm going to be sick.' And sick she was offstage and then returned to try once more, a little whiter." The illness continued all afternoon.

The star of the show throwing up in between scenes was not the only problem during the technical run-th