In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  At the end of the Second World War, Jason had come out of the navy not knowing where to turn. Some good Samaritan informed him the American Theatre Wing in New York was offering a special deal for returning servicemen—a year of free tuition in the arts. Jason jumped at the chance and enrolled. He chose singing. History proves he did not become the world’s leading countertenor nor a major authority on lieder. Instead, he became, thankfully for us, an actor. At the time of our meeting, he had just made a phenomenal success of Hickey in The Iceman Cometh at Circle in the Square in one of the most dynamic and shattering performances I have ever seen. His explosive combustion of pain and laughter hit me with such force as I sat glued to my seat, I utterly forgot I was in a theatre and could do nothing but helplessly succumb to his desperate outpourings as if they were mine alone. With this moving creation, he had seriously revived the real spirit of O’Neill and would become in our time that author’s most famous and definitive interpreter. I am certain that had O’Neill lived to see Jason perform, he would have cast aside his customary melancholia and leapt for joy.

  Robards, in my thinking, belonged to a generation of American actors long gone. They were part of a Golden Age of theatre in this country, around the turn of the century or even much before. Had he been alive then, he would have felt much at home with either of the Booth brothers, the Davenports, Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Forrest, the senior Tyrone Power or any of the Barrymores. He would also have given them a hell of a run for their money. Though he played realistically, he was always larger than life and completely instinctive. He gave naturalism a classic proportion. Already back then, he knew, perhaps too well, the hidden soul within him and could release his demons and pixies at will, they were all so perilously close to the surface. Advantage was often taken of Jason’s innocence, openness and deep generosity: he wore his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at.

  Me, Julie, and Jason

  The Palace Bar and Grill on West Forty-seventh Street was a favourite hangout of ours; I don’t remember it ever closing. It was a narrow room with a long, unpolished, peeling mahogany bar which ran the entire length of it. When empty, it was seedy and depressing as hell—when full, it was the richest, warmest room in town. It resounded nightly in jubilant celebration and its regulars were characters that could have dripped off the pen of William Saroyan. Donald Voorhees, Gene Kelly, Adlai Stevenson, Bernie Hart, Ben Gazzara, Maureen Stapleton and dear Stritch often dropped in and paid their respects. Gene Kelly had affectionately remembered it since his early Broadway dancing years. The rest of the mob that frequented it were actors and journalists and a quaint assortment of ancient fugitives from the Lambs’ Club. Whatever desperate secrets had brought them together, they were neither resigned nor morose. They were determined at all costs never to go gentle into that good night.

  Sol, the bartender, owl-like, soft-spoken, with a sympathetic ear, was master of ceremonies—the attending High Priest poised to give us final absolution. No matter how big the congregation, it seemed that everyone was biding his time, waiting for Jason to appear before the evening could be called complete. Through the heavy smoke and deafening din, he would make his entrance shouting an old Russ Columbo favourite, “Just friends, lovers no more.” Without warning, it was a habit of Jason’s to burst out in a sudden flood of verse from the works of Patterson, Service, Drummond and other such semiclassicists. At the drop of a drink, he might let fly all forty verses of “Eskimo Nell.” He also possessed a charming whiskey baritone, and later in the early morning hours, when the room had subsided to a mellow calm, accompanying himself on the guitar, he would softly chant in torpid nostalgia, “Summers in Bordeaux, rowing the bateau, where the willow hung, just a dream ago, when the world was young,” over and over, bridge and all, to some private and misbegotten moon.

  “IF ANY OF YOU BUMS wants a line change, I’m charging eight-fifty a word.” Up spake Arch Oboler, writer, from the rear of the stalls.

  Yes, I was back on “the Street”—once more under the caring banner of Kermit Bloomgarden; and yes, this time my name was above the title and, would you believe it, in lights as well. I circled the block till I wore out the pavement staring up at the marquee to make sure my eyes did not deceive me. They didn’t. Jane Broder had once again fought valiantly—bless her. I was not alone up there, mind; my two partners (not to be sneezed at) were Claude Rains, the old master himself, and that character from Hollywood with the offbeat charm and whimsical light touch—Wendell Corey. The two remaining cast members were, in their own right, just as impressive—Dick York (later famous in Bewitched) and Martin Brooks. Our ill-fated company of five was stage-managed, mothered and coddled by Elaine Carrington’s no longer wayward son, Robert; and the director, once the boy Jesus in Max Reinhardt’s production of The Miracle who, still very much in character, continued to suffer all us little children to come unto him, was Sidney Lumet. The play was Night of the Auk.

  Perhaps the most accurate assessment of the work and the tidiest summation of the audience’s general perplexity came in the form of an opening-night telegram sent to me by the actor Jack Warden. How he got it through the mail service, I’ll never know, for it simply read, “What the fuck’s an Auk?!”

  Claude Rains and me in The Night of the Auk, directed by Sidney Lumet

  The play’s action concerned a rocketship returning to planet Earth after man’s first landing on the moon. On the journey back, the crew learns that atomic war has broken out on Earth and that their ship is almost certainly doomed. Prophesying an atomic age that could leave man as extinct as the auk, Mr. Oboler couched his potentially interesting idea in sententious blank verse that gave the colour purple a deeper, more pungent tone than usual and offered, as one critic opined, “ten frills for every frisson.”

  Yet there was a pioneering spirit about it, a sense of being in front of its time. It anticipated Bradbury, Roddenberry and a goodly number of sci-fi chefs that would soon monopolize the market. If only Arch had not persisted in impressing all and sundry with his pretentiously elaborate and subhuman English! Kermit made many a constructive suggestion to remedy that, but Oboler would only turn a deaf ear. Claude Rains, who had the longest speeches, went about his masterly business as usual, never complaining and managed to make it all sound like Milton or Wordsworth, but Wendell and I had the much more difficult task of trying to make our stilted brief exchanges sound contemporary and natural. While attempting at rehearsal to underplay a scene particularly overloaded with rodomontade, Oboler would interrupt us and yell out, “That’s about as exciting as watching Jeff Chandler and Sonny Tufts.” Theatre protocol generally frowns on playwrights who voice their opinions loudly during a rehearsal—after all, that is a function of the director. So to cover the embarrassing silence caused by the clumsy gaffe, Wendell and I shook hands and introduced ourselves: “Hi, Jeff”—“Nice workin’ with you, Sonny.” The author was not amused.

  Arch Oboler was a squat, gnomelike figure who wore expensive leather Windbreakers and narrow-brimmed porkpie hats. He continuously wisecracked in rather coarse one-liner quips which gave the impression he was auditioning for the Catskill circuit. He had been one of radio’s most prolific writers and among the first to make a feature film in 3-D, the film process introduced into cinemas for which you were forced to put on goggles of dark glass in order to view the images on the screen. Looking like an early motorist, you would watch the action in laser-sharp relief leap out at you in aggressive three-dimensional proximity. That was all very fine, but upon removing the offending spectacles you became strangely disoriented, a trifle dizzy and, in some cases, engulfed in nausea. After my first 3-D encounter (Bwana Devil), there was no other. I had, in fact, been quite seasick. I told this to Wendell who, every time an altercation arose with the stubborn little author, would whisper violently in my ear, “Go on! Quick! Tell him you puked at his film! Tell ’im now!”

  Of course, Arch had become quite wealthy in the process so he went out and bought himself a small mountain
he could call his own—somewhere in Nevada, Colorado or Montana (I’m not sure which)—probably one of the Tetons. Each day, he became more and more obsessed with atomic war and convinced that at any second the world was about to end, he had his mountain excavated in order to create what was possibly the first private bomb shelter in the United States.

  One day, his little boy was playing dangerously near the mouth of this man-made crater, when he slipped and fell to his death. Instead of taking at least some of the blame for this awful tragedy, Arch went about righteously exclaiming to the world in general that his child had been the first victim of the Atomic Age on home ground. Bloomgar-den, by now fed up to the teeth with Arch and anything to do with him, could be heard muttering under his breath, “The wrong Oboler went down the hole.”

  There was nothing to be done. No miracle could save us now. Not even the boy Jesus could raise this dialogue from the page—it was deader than any sea scroll; so the whole debacle came to a merciful end after a week’s run at the Playhouse in spite of a sensitive and beautifully spoken performance by Mr. Rains. No one was sorry—not even Ker-mit, who had taken such pains to raise the money. Arch Oboler didn’t even bother to hang around long enough to say good-bye. The only element of the play that survived the closing and enjoyed a little “hit” run of its own was Howard Bay’s remarkable set; for the rocket ship’s interior, complete with Perspex floors, on different levels lit from beneath, multiple control panels, blinking lights—everything representing the highest of high tech—seemed the only live creation on the planet. Young Bob Carrington bought the whole caboodle, shipped it out to his mum’s estate on Long Island, charged admission and probably made more money than anyone remotely connected with the play.

  THE BOY JESUS, in all his bountiful mercy, took pity on me and as a consolation prize hired me for his next film, already in production, the remake of Stage Struck. It was my Big Screen debut and I played a very young writer in love with the female star—eighteen-year-old Susan Strasberg. The boy Jesus had recently stumbled onto his eleventh commandment—obeying it most successfully, “Thou shalt become a director of film and thou shalt not suffer anyone to covet thy editing room.” With fiery determination, he immersed himself in everyone’s problems—the little Messiah seemed to be everywhere at once—in fact, this year was turning out to be very much a boy Jesus year.

  Sidney “Keep ’em in the East” Lumet or “Bubuleh” as he was affectionately known to most of us, was a stockily built little firecracker who tirelessly worried over his brood, rabble-rousing us like some possessed cheerleader. A street-smart young filmmaker with a mission, who loved New York, he was every kid on the block and stubbornly refused to film anywhere else. He felt it his duty to keep Manhattan the moviemaking town it had always been, particularly as Hollywood was stealing everything away from it, including his other toy, television. And the powers that be let him! For young Sidney was just about the hottest director around—his 12 Angry Men had already made history on its own. He was especially good at gathering together great casts—most of the top tough-guy actors in town had worked for him but with Stage Struck, a romantic comedy, he was on slightly foreign ground. So to give it the proper patina, he hired Herbert Marshall, that distinguished British arbiter of gentlemanly elegance and the veddy Bwitish and veddy eccentric comedienne Joan Greenwood (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Importance of Being Earnest). The required American star name that rounded out the dramatis personae was graceful Henry Fonda.

  Susan Strasberg had just scored a New York success by creating the role of Anne Frank. I got an instant crush. Though we giggled a lot together, she scarcely noticed, being too busy basking in adulation or taking notes from her ever-present mother and coach—Paula. Paula was a nice lady, warm, intelligent and was probably one hell of a good coach, but she drove Sidney crazy because she made Susan listen only to her. One morning, tearing his hair out of its roots, Bubuleh whispered (he never screamed), “She’s keeping all of us waiting! Everyone—crew, actors, producers—while she and that mother of hers are locked in the bathroom giving each other acting lessons!” Paula was unintentionally naughty that way—she never ceased to indulge her already overly indulged daughter, carrying the Method and its message to unprofessional extremes. She would say to Susan, “Stay in your room and don’t come out till you feel you’re really ready—they can wait.” She gave the same sort of advice to Marilyn Monroe whom she coached in The Prince and the Showgirl, which similarly drove Laurence Olivier (its director and costar) around the bend.

  Memories of the year of boy Jesus come in quick flashes—Sidney’s vast collection of hats and caps from which he chose a different one for each hour; I can see so clearly that wonderful handpicked crew of technicians who did all the top films from New York (I was to work with them a lot). I’m positive they themselves had invented the motto “Keep ’em in the East.” They had a mock disdain for the West Coast that was hilarious and not without reason, for Hollywood during that period was for the most part grinding out cutesy Doris Day movies, while they were making On the Waterfront, Panic in the Streets, A Streetcar Named Desire—works of some stature and substance. They had been very much Elia Kazan’s boys, had taken turns with George Roy Hill, Franklin Schaffner and of course, Sidney.

  A tight-knit family, professional, quick, efficient, they still found time to horse around which kept morale high on those cold, windy Gotham nights. I remember them all with affectionate glee—“Salty” the prop man who was always complaining he had nothing on his truck and at the very last tense moment would produce miracles out of a hat. Bill Garity, Charlie Maguire (ADs) always laughing, always long-suffering, always enthusiastic. Robert Jiras (B.J. for short), makeup man extraordinaire, and my good friend, was cursed with the severest case of self-deprecating humour I’ve ever come across. I suppose it was his Hungarian blood that inspired such madness. Apart from being tops in his field, he was exceedingly bright, an erstwhile producer and writer.

  He had already written a script, his Place in the Sun as he called it, which was titled The River. Shrouded in mystery, it was so special, so different, the plot so delicate, the subject matter so sensitive, that I don’t think anyone had dared read it nor was allowed to. It was always just about to be “picked up,” but not yet produced. The whole thing became a running gag—the entire crew were in on it—and all B.J. had to say was, “I’ve got this script called The River,” and everyone, including B.J., would fall on the floor. The remainder of the crew were the Flaherty brothers, chief grip Jack and his fast-talking comedian brother Ed, the “intellectual” grip who amusingly defended all the world’s losers. Both spoke a separate and most original jargon which kept us permanently convulsed. Boris Kaufman, the brilliant but aging cameraman, fell off his perch one day with a heart scare. As he lay there heaving and pale, Jack (head grip) shouted to Salty, “Brandy on the double.” When it arrived, Jack took it, downed it in one gulp and quipped, “Now get one for Boris!”

  I remember how impressed I was with Herbert “Bart” Marshall’s smoothness as an actor, his effortless technique (a later Gerald du Mau-rier) and his very great personal charm. He was famous for his limp, the result of a botched amputation by German doctors when he was held prisoner in the Great War. They had severed his leg in the wrong place, stitching the nerves together. What courage he exhibited, never letting us be aware for an instant that he was suffering permanent pain.

  I recall with amusement and gratitude my friendship with tiny Joan Greenwood, whose low, deep voice resembled the cooing of doves. She always came into a room sideways in a kind of shuffle-off-to-Buffalo move. She was so eccentric one thought at first it was all put on—but indeed not! I’m convinced that she’d emerged from the womb sidesaddle. That great lady and actress, Cathleen Nesbitt, had loaned Joan her apartment while she was away and the two of us used to end up there occasionally after work.

  Herbert Marshall—the epitome of civility and polish

  Miss Nesbitt, as everyone knew, had,
as a young girl, been the lover and mistress of the poet Rupert Brooke. He had written most of his famous love poems for her—it was she who had inspired them. “Listen, dahling,” burbled Joan one evening, “I know exactly where Cathleen hides all her love letters from Brooke—I’ve found the keys. Let’s get ourselves nicely tiddly and burrow our way through them, shall we?” Mischievous Miss Greenwood, batting her eyelids with schoolgirl innocence, proceeded to rifle Cathleen’s dresser drawers, spread the yellowing letters on the floor and together like two ravenous Peeping Toms, we devoured their romantic contents. They were absolutely extraordinary in their beauty, so intimate, so very private. And as we made love on the floor among them, I felt we had stolen into some forbidden garden and had come upon the secret of passion itself.

  IF THE REAL JESUS had ever married, it might conceivably have been to Gloria Vanderbilt. After all, very few needed to receive as much tenderness and mercy all the days of their lives as did Gloria, whose past had been so plagued with pain and public scrutiny. Sidney seemed to care for her as gently as if she were a precious gem. Gloria, who was going through her “thespian” period, must have been both grateful and content that in the arts they shared so much in common. Gloria was beautiful, vulnerable and intensely shy. Yet in spite of this shyness she was certainly one of the most dynamic of hostesses. She packed her parties with everyone that mattered in the theatre, ballet and music worlds and her exquisite apartment on Gracie Square literally jumped the whole season long. It seemed there was a party every week and she and Sidney sweetly saw to it that I was always included.

  You would find Marilyn Monroe sitting at the feet of Isak Dinesen, Oona O’Neill and Sydney Chaplin in conversation with Harold Arlen and George Balanchine. There, in a corner, would be Truman Capote mesmerizing a little adoring group with his high nasal twang and at the piano, Leonard Bernstein, once again getting laughs with his “Piano Concerto for the Left Foot.” Adolph Green and Betty Comden spoofing their own song “It’s the fuckiest fuck of the year” from Bells Are Ringing while its star, Judy Holliday, collapsed laughing on a nearby ottoman. Fritz Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner watching Sammy Davis and Miss Monroe, she looking more edible than ever, singing duets accompanied by Jule Styne. There was almost more entertainment going on between those walls than in the Big Apple itself.