In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  Geraldine McEwan, my new Beatrice in Much Ado

  I hadn’t much time, for already the season had begun. And what a season! The newly named Royal Shakespeare Company could hold its head up very high indeed. Its youthful members ranged from a whimsical Geraldine McEwan, a magical Dorothy Tutin, a young and glorious Vanessa Redgrave to Ian Bannen, Eric Porter, Ian Richardson, Roy Dotrice, Colin Blakely, Richard Johnson, Peter O’Toole, down to the very youngest of them all, Ian Holm, Diana Rigg and the adorable Judi Dench. Each one became a star in his or her own right and collectively they would form the very spine of British drama for the next thirty years. To add to this illustrious roster, the older guard were splendidly represented by Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Margaret Leighton, Dame Edith Evans, Esmond Knight and Sir John Gielgud. And I had garnered most of the plums! From the crass New World, I had crossed the ocean to take the wind from their sails, beat ’em at their own game—I was insupportable!

  MOST OF THE THEATRICAL cognoscenti are aware that apart from being perhaps the greatest verse speaker of the last century, John Gielgud was also notoriously and endearingly guilty of hundreds of delicately mistimed and embarrassing faux pas, boners, gaffes, bloopers—call ’em what you will—that have, by now, become part of stage history.

  Example A. Having lunch at The Ivy in London many years ago with Bobby Andrews (Ivor Novello’s new male lover), John suddenly spots Novello making his entrance through the revolving door and turning to his companion whispers, “Ah, there’s Ivor! All alone for the first time without that dreadful little bore, Bobby Andrews!”

  Example B. After a Hamlet performance by Richard Burton (which John has directed) outside his dressing room about to take Burton to supper with friends: “I’ll wait for you out here, dear boy, till you’re better—I mean—ready—I mean, oh never mind.”

  Example C. The late George Rose told me of this exchange between Sir John and himself while Sir John was directing him as the grave digger in Hamlet.

  SIR JOHN: Could you hold the skull a little higher so we could all see it, dear boy?

  GEORGE: Yes, of course.

  SIR JOHN: By the way, did you see Paul Scofield’s Lear?

  GEORGE: Yes.

  SIR JOHN: What did you think of it?

  GEORGE: I very much preferred yours in ’52.

  SIR JOHN: Mine? My Lear? Did you see it?

  GEORGE: I was in it.

  SIR JOHN: Oh! What did you play?

  GEORGE: Oswald.

  SIR JOHN: Of course you did. And how very good you were too!

  A champion of faux pas named Sir John

  At shocking his friends truly shone

  Not intending to sting

  He would say the wrong thing

  And wonder why they’d all upped and gone!

  Anyone who knew John is, of course, pleasantly aware that there was not a malicious streak in his entire makeup. I had worked with him on several films since and can gladly add my twopence to the hordes of actors who have already donated theirs that he was possibly the most modest and least selfish of performers ever to grace our profession. These qualities have surely contributed to the noble and elegant manner by which he reached his exalted age. In his midnineties, he still strode rapidly forth, ramrod straight while, one by one, his close contemporaries and those younger still, fell by the wayside.

  Back in 1961, however, I hardly knew him. I was a distant admirer and was familiar with most of the funny anecdotes concerning him, but that was all. One day I passed Sir John in the corridor waiting to rehearse his Othello in the room which I, as Richard III, had just vacated. He was leaning against the wall with a casual grace, an elegant scarf in loose folds about his neck, a hat tilted at a jaunty angle, looking for all the world like a stylish Edwardian dandy. Pleased with my progress as Richard, and very full of myself, I gratingly greeted him with the gruffest of modern-day catcalls, condescendingly slapped the great man on the back and wished him the best of much-needed luck, as if he were appearing in some minor church-basement offering down the street. As I passed, he quietly readjusted his clothes to their original splendour and in a voice so compassionate, so beautifully modulated, but not without the slightest hint of edge, said, “Ah, Christopher, and how are you in your own small way?”

  I would like to think that was one of his bloopers—but I don’t hold out much hope.

  ANNE HATHAWAY’S cottage was always excruciatingly cold, even in the daytime when tourists came to gape. I had a room there in which sat a pathetic contraption called a gas fire with a meter into which one inserted a shilling to receive any semblance of what was laughingly called heat. A very comely but skinny lass who assisted in “wardrobe” and who lived in even colder digs than I, agreed to share my bed. In return I fed her as much as I could to fatten her up but to no avail. We clung to each other through the bitter nights and though her insatiable appetite for grub never gained her an ounce of weight, she certainly made chez Hathaway a lot warmer, bless her rattling bones! This partnership was alas short-lived (when the costumes were complete, her job was over), and I moved into Avoncliff—an old mansion that belonged to the Flower family, who owned Flower’s Ale and employed most of the town. Sir Fordham Flower, whom we all called “Fordy,” was the industry’s current CFO and also president of the theatre’s Board of Directors. Peter Hall, his lovely wife, Leslie Caron, the film star, and their children occupied most of the house and I was relegated to the Billiard Room, large enough to swing several cats in but every bit as congealing as the cottage. When I wasn’t witch hunting for witches to help warm it up, I spent most of the time warming up at a famous pub called The Black Swan, better known as “The Dirty Duck.”

  It had recently been taken over by an attractive, outgoing married couple, Ben and Margot Shepherd, who turned it into the coziest and most fun hostel, I venture to say, in the entire county of Warwickshire. The fact that it was the actors’ pub and diagonally across from the Memorial Theatre was its main attraction. A faithful few from the town’s locals and stragglers from the audience patronized it but it belonged mostly to us theatre folk and the Shepherds saw to it that it stayed that way. They would throw out the public at “last call,” shut the doors, reopen the bar and the snack kitchen and we would stay all night long, a great deal of booze being consumed “on the house.” The walls of the main bar were completely covered with photos of actors and directors who had worked on that Stratford stage since its beginnings and all of us were up there on the wall too, including Sir John. A while back, when John had been famously arrested in London for exhibiting his homosexuality, the then owner immediately took John’s picture down from the wall in self-righteous disapproval. So respected and loved was Sir John that every living actor represented on that wall removed theirs as well in defiant protest. They even blackballed the pub. John’s photograph was instantly remounted and gradually the gallery became once again complete. But the publican responsible for such bigotry left under a considerable cloud and it was Ben and Margot, the two good Shepherds, who soon gathered their newfound flock around them and gave us all a home in which to graze.

  The late-stayer-uppers I befriended included an aging musician-composer Alec Whittaker; two gregarious character actors—one Patrick Wymark, and the other a robust old comic straight out of Dickens named Newton Blick. Then there was Ian Richardson, later well known for his portrayal of Nehru on television and for his hilarious BBC series House of Cards, whose speech, the drunker he got, became more and more precise and perfect Highland; and my newest and closet friend of them all—that other mad Scot, Ian Bannen.

  Ian Bannen, a mythical creature and a comrade forever

  Ian, who was so marvellous recently in Waking Ned Devine, his last film before he died in a tragic car accident, was for me back then the perfect companion replacement for Jason Robards. Although as men they were poles apart in most aspects, they did share two enviable gifts—prodigious talent and great freedom of spirit. Also, as coincidence would have it, Bannen was Britain’s
answer to Eugene O’Neill, having achieved great success in the identical roles Jason had performed in America. Ian was a handsome dog, thin and wiry with sharp, fine features, a noble brow and a voice that resembled the soughing of winds across the moors. He lived a life of complexity, a life mixed with gigantic gusts of joy and long walks through dense mists of gloom and despondency. There was absolutely nothing English about him; he was pure Norse. He also loved classical music and at parties when most youths lined up to play the latest pop tunes on the phonograph, Ian would move into the queue clutching his favourite grand-opera LPs guaranteed to kill the evening outright, much to his diabolic delight and mine. Ian that season had quite typically taken on much too much, encumbering himself with an exhausting repertoire that would have killed a man half his years. Orlando, Buckingham to my Richard, Mercutio and two of the longest parts ever written—Iago and Hamlet—all in one summer!

  He moved from one rehearsal to another nonstop in a kind of daze and was invariably at the wrong play at the wrong time. One morning he was a whole two hours late and when he finally arrived, with great courtesy he announced to the entire company who’d been sitting around waiting: “I’m so sorry, hearts, but I spent an inordinate time shaving this morning.” Common sense would have told him to live near the theatre, considering his daft schedule, but his love of romance made him choose to live several miles outside Stratford at Hampton Lucy, the famous old Elizabethan estate belonging to the ancient Lucy family, where Shakespeare had once been arrested for poaching and where, as a result, Twelfth Night was conceived and its setting established. Ian adored the eccentricity and mystery about the old place and haunted it as if he were a bewitched Andrew Aguecheek.

  His Hamlet, directed by Peter Wood, opened early in the season and we all went in a group to see it. It was, to say the least, frenzied but in many instances quite remarkable. It was not necessary for this Hamlet to feign madness before the court—he was quite bonkers already. His rendering of the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy was particularly unnerving. On his scream of “O, vengeance!” in the middle of the speech, he leapt into a trunk of props the players had left behind. It was an exciting and imaginative bit of business and would have proved most successful had he not chosen to close the lid after him. For a few seconds one could have heard a pin drop as the audience stared dumbly at the solitary trunk in the center of the stage. Then they began to titter nervously, for Ian, God love him, had waited a trifle too long before flinging it open and appearing once again. Unfortunately, when he did appear, his next line was, “Why, what an ass am I!” which, of course, brought down the house. Somehow, he miraculously managed to get them back and the play resumed its frantic pace, at all times bordering on the brink of recklessness. One went away from the evening wondering if perhaps this wasn’t the way one should always play Hamlet—unhinged from the start.

  The dry old mausoleum of a theatre was considerably brightened that year by an unusual wealth of directorial talent: on the menu we were offered three Michaels—Michael Elliott, Michael Langham and, from France, Michel Saint-Denis; three Peters—Brook, Wood and Hall; one whiz kid from the Royal Court Theatre—William Gaskill, and, from Italy, a young and precocious Franco Zeffirelli. Franco’s production of Othello was the next opening I was to attend. Gielgud was the Moor, and Ian played a strangely lovable and dippy Iago. He was by now completely and understandably exhausted from all the memory work he had undertaken, so a lot of his lines that night eluded him. Cassio had barely begun speaking when Ian wandered onto the stage and casually departed from the text by informing us that Michael Cas-sio was dead and then, realizing his blunder, made matters considerably worse by adding, “Uh—nearly dead.” Otherwise, his immense charm carried him through unscathed.

  John Gielgud was the antithesis of Othello, far too refined, too subtle and much too nineteenth century a man to ever suggest that great and passionate African general. Although he spoke the golden verse beautifully and with great authority, his light string instrument of a voice, when angry, rose to a high-pitched shriek where the sound of trumpets and trombones are required. He was badly miscast and John, with all his intelligence, knew this, of course, but with his usual bravery was determined to take a crack at it. John confessed that he was always hopelessly nervous on first nights, so on this occasion, he was quite naturally more nervous than ever and at one point swallowed half of his false mustache.

  The play seemed longer that night than I ever remember it due mostly to Zeffirelli’s heavy, elaborate settings, which he insisted on designing and building for almost every scene. Each change, therefore, took so long (they’d not been properly rehearsed) that the audience, thinking they were intermissions, filed out into the lobby. They then had to be herded back each time before the act could resume. When the real intermission finally arrived, it was of necessity so short, they had no time to even leave their seats. I remember Sir John at season’s end giving a farewell speech to the audience, gratefully praising places such as Stratford “where we are permitted to experiment, make fools of ourselves and forever learn.”

  Coming to his senses, Ian Bannen had begun to cut down on his workload by giving up Buckingham. He was replaced by Eric Porter. I missed Ian a lot at rehearsals (we’d had such fun), but Eric was terrific and a marvellous actor. I was rehearsing Richard III by day and playing Benedick at night. One night after the Much Ado performance, I was about to remove my uniform when the stage manager called to me: “Keep your uniform on; Field Marshal Montgomery was in the audience tonight. He’s in the VIP room now, waiting to see you.” I ran down the stairs, doing up my tunic as I went, knocked on the door and entered. A very small, natty man stood before me with salt-and-pepper hair, a tiny military mustache, wearing a double-breasted grey flannel suit and leaning on a cane. “Plummer, is it?” he barked at me in a whiny, clipped little voice. “Yes, my lord,” I mumbled apprehensively. I kept clicking my heels together automatically (I’d been doing it all night on stage). “You were splendid—splendid,” he said. “Thank you, sir. I uh—” but he interrupted, pointing at me as if he remembered something. The corners of his mouth twitched slightly into a kind of smile. “Weren’t you—ah?” the field marshall began. I knew what he was going to say so I thought I better stop him, “No sir, I did not serve under you; I was not at Alamein or anywhere else, sir; I was too young for the war, sir!” He looked terribly disappointed and slightly annoyed. “Strange. I could have sworn—” Then a beat: “You’re Canadian, aren’t you?” (He’d read my bio in the programme.) “Yes, sir,” I replied. “They were all with me in the desert, you know.” Then he pinned me with those sharp, narrow little eyes of his and said, “Great killers—the Canadians.” I couldn’t exactly respond to that, but as it happened, I didn’t have to for he’d already gone.

  THE DESIGNER OF Richard III, Jocelyn Herbert, had sewn an enormous hump in the left shoulder of all my tunics to give the impression of great deformity. To exaggerate this even further, I limped through rehearsals with one shoulder higher than the other and a brace around my left arm to make it appear shorter. In fact, I spent most of my days walking about in this manner. There was only a week and a bit left before we were to open when suddenly my whole left side seized up in a vicelike cramp. I found it difficult to breathe and the pain was excruciating. Richard is just about the most exhausting of all the great roles from the vocal point of view as well as the huge physical energy that is required. This is due to the fact that the Bard (who wrote the play when quite young) never gave his “star” the necessary “rests” throughout the evening. All the relentless vocal pyrotechnics occur in the first quarter of the piece, then Richard has a very short break or two until the end when the pyrotechnics reappear, this time performed in a white heat. Not satisfied, the author makes poor Richard fight an unconscionably long and fearsome duel before he finally and mercifully expires. To render this all the more tiring, John Barton had choreographed a brilliantly grotesque and terrifying duel for me by tying a
long and heavy spiked ball and chain to my withered arm which I could lash out with at intervals whilst with the other I brandished a huge oversized broadsword. But now that I could hardly move, all seemed lost. Michael Langham had recovered from his polyp surgery, and he and Helen were staying in town. Helen took one look at my paralytic plight and insisted I see her doctor, Tibor Czato, at once who, as luck would have it, happened to be their weekend guest. I had already visited the local doctors, and one specialist from London had been brought in courtesy of the theatre—but none knew what was wrong and were of no help at all.

  Tibor, quite obviously, was a Hungarian and had the most comfortable bedside manner I’ve ever known. A man in his sixties with a graying mass of hair, he dressed more like a great painter or poet than a great doctor. He always seemed to have egg stains on his clothes and, at all times, gave the impression of organized chaos. Yet, a great doctor he surely was, one of the very best diagnosticians in England and quite possibly Europe as well. He had been the family doctor and friend of the Hungarian film magnate Sir Alexander Korda, his famous brothers, Vincent and Zoltan, and their separate offspring for most of his life. He was also Picasso’s doctor, and, as most of the time he refused payment, Picasso instead paid him with his own paintings and drawings so that Tibor’s consulting room and his home proudly displayed wall-to-wall Picassos. He took one look at me and said in the thickest of Magyar accents, “Krees, yoor awnly breezing oud ov von long!” And then he named some unpronounceable disease and gave me some shots. In no time I was back in action. This miracle medicine man, whom I would call upon again much later, had in a brief second taken charge and, as one good thing breeds another, Florence Nightingale in the person of Sue Fonda showed up at the theatre all the way from New York, just in time to help nurse me back to health.