In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  GETTNER: I’d have prayed and begged and bullied her to fetch me…

  There was no one else I could believe would come;

  Except the firing squad, which I was not

  In the mood to welcome.

  With the blood of Florence Nightingale coursing through her veins, Miss Kit was at my bedside every other day. She brought me radios, books, presents of all sorts. She showered me with kindness. She had even found a motive for all my past conduct. She had convinced herself that I was not just a twenty-four-year-old drunk after all—it was the hepatitis which had caused my strange behavior! Hers was an executive pardon on the highest level. Guthrie too, who had not a shred of patience for illness of any kind, came to pay his respects, sit on my bed and make me laugh till it hurt. He told me that Ty Power had also been struck down with the same virus, was hospitalized, and that they would postpone and reopen when we both recovered. Some chutzpah, I thought.

  They waited; we recovered—we opened. It was a brief but distinguished New York run—the “crickets” were respectful—my Zichy was praised. I even won a trinket or two and was dubbed most promising newcomer along with Barbara Cook and Julie Andrews. But everything was breaking up. Fry’s sun and moon were on the wane. Tyrone Power was going back to lotusland. Guthrie was busy concocting new theatrical soufflés—in short, we were closing. Miss Kit called me into her theatrical boudoir once again (I couldn’t believe it—Evelyn was still brushing her hair) and told me she was taking the play on the road to a few major cities as a triumphant finale, but she didn’t have a leading man. Then she dangled the carrot in front of me—Gettner! Oh, how I had dreamed of that chance but I had dreamed too hard—it was too late; the thrill was over. I yearned for some new adventure and Guthrie, bless him, took up the slack—flew me to Paris, to the deeper but nobler gloom of Greek tragedy and a little Tasmanian devil called Judith Anderson. From a captain in the Hungarian army to captain of the Argonauts. Not too shabby after all!

  KIT AND GUTHRIE—a mythical pair indeed. What a startling contrast they made, the two of them! She—a monument, beautiful, remote, seeking solace among her women; he—feisty, promiscuous, the court jester shocking all and sundry with his acid tongue, an ageless and irreverent schoolboy let loose in the Temple of the Muse. Their house at Snedens Landing became a haven for the glitterati of the time, which ranged from the Sitwells to Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda to Stravinsky, the Gerald Murphys and Eleanor Roosevelt to Amelia Earhart and Helen Keller. On a single weekend one could have easily collided with Alexander Woollcott, the Lunts, Noël and Gertie, Larry and Vivien, Garbo or Kirsten Flagstad and in the center of them all—Guthrie—the gregarious raconteur stage-managing life as one long party.

  But the party which he had helped to keep fresh was just about over. A coarser, far crueler era was fast approaching, and wise old Guthrie had seen it coming long in advance and braced himself for it like some irascible Quixote. He lost, of course, saved from bitterness by his innate sense of puckish glee. I think towards the end it was cancer that forced his low profile, but one day he just vanished completely from our midst as undetected as Houdini.

  He truly was the most entertaining of men. His reign had been solid, enduring, vastly successful, even dazzling. And when it ceased, a certain grace, elegance and glamour left the American theatre that has never been captured since. I’m grateful beyond measure I was there at the end to wave it good-bye. Will it nae’ come back agen? Ach! I ha’ ma doots! For the lad wi’ the magic box has swallowed the key.

  CHAPTER TWELVE, PART ONE

  TWO STRATFORDS

  What they gonna keep under there—snakes?

  Yep! That’s what a lotta the town folk were askin’. Too wary and suspicious to get near and find out for themselves, they made damn certain to give it wide berth. Oh sure, they knew some-thin’ was goin’ on all right; a tent was being put up—that’s what. A whoppin’ big tent—right out there, see, on the edge of town, by the river? Some guys all the way up from Chicago—Ringling Brothers was it? And that world expert on tents—that wiry old boss man himself with the battered ten-gallon hat climbing all over the canvas—Skip Manley? What d’ya make of him, Chrissakes? And who were all them strangers comin’ inta town—all them big fancy chauffeur-driven cars? Why, one day someone said they saw the governor general’s limo with all his flags flyin’ and a motorcycle escort whisk by! And those consarn newspaper men from all over Canada, even the U.S. of A., not to mention yer jolly Ol’ England—what were they doin’ here? What did they want anyway? Was this a takeover of some sort? And what about our quiet little town where nobody bothered us—what about our peace of mind? Hell! What about our jobs?

  Of course, they didn’t know it but just a few years down the road, those same guys and damn near every Tom, Dick and Harry like ’em would triple their businesses and the sleepy little railroad town of Stratford-on-Avon, Ontario, which they called home would boom and boom big! And it was all the fault of one of their own. Yep, a local journalist just back from the war, a small natty man in love with bow ties, with a feisty charm and a head full of dreams by name of Tom Patterson was to blame. Yessir! If you wanted to lay it all at someone’s feet it would be Tom’s all right. You see, Tom was makin’ trouble again. Somethin’ weird had come over him—he even looked funny—he must have been having another of his “inspirations.” Only this time he’d gone too far—this time he was downright certifiable. Tom had simply wondered why North America didn’t deserve a great classic theatre like the famous one at Stratford-upon-Avon, England? And why couldn’t it be right here in the little Ontario town, his town, that bore its name?

  Well, there were no white-coated attendants with straitjackets; no one summoned the sheriff. Instead, a loyal little steadfast group of town folk got behind Tom and swore allegiance to the death. They even raised enough money for a telegram or a phone call to anywhere in the globe. Who was the best and most acknowledged master of the classic theatre in the English world that could head this impossible dream? That’s what Tom wanted to know and someone called Dora Mavor Moore told him. Tom telegraphed to northern Ireland—would this outlandish scheme ever light one tiny spark of interest?

  The postman in Doouaght, County Monaghan, jumped on his bicycle and pedalled furiously up the hill to a large rundown estate known as Annaghmakerrig, which smugly boasted no telephone. The owner, a tall man of six foot five or over who looked somewhat like an eagle, mounted his bicycle, accompanied the man down the hill, picked up the post office phone and called Tom. All Tom heard were just four words—“When do we start?”

  The gods had responded. Patterson had hit the mark for the great man himself. The Good Doctor, Tyrone Guthrie, was as big a dreamer as he, and, as a bold adventurer in the world of make-believe, a veritable Ulysses. Decades earlier in London under the strict regime of Lilian Baylis, “the Ol’ gel from the Vic,” he had become Peck’s bad boy of the stage shocking traditionalists with his unorthodox treatments of the classics. After Miss Baylis died, the doctor, firmly tucking the Old Vic under his own wing, whipped up many irreverent but highly spectacular concoctions igniting the young careers of Laughton, Olivier, Richardson and Guinness; in fact most of the top British talent of the early twentieth century had grown up under his thumb.

  The little maker of miracles

  A Tyrone Guthrie production was more of a “happening” than an evening of theatre—banners flying, flags waving, whole multitudes masterfully choreographed, sweeping across the stage, scenes changing at staggering speed and then, suddenly, in stark contrast, at his command, the absolutely still moments of great beauty and simplicity. He was forever adding new feathers to old wings and there was never a dull moment—his failures were as big as his successes. Apart from his ringmaster’s instinct for the circus which he never lost, theatre to him was a place of worship, of ritual, a religion, perhaps the oldest of all. Glaring proof of this were his extraordinary productions of Chaucer’s morality plays, called A Satire of the Three Estates
, at the Edinburgh International Festival, and a mammoth Tamburlaine, of Christopher Marlowe’s in London starring Sir Donald Wolfit. Both had put the theatre on another plain—both had made theatrical history.

  For The Three Estates, the brilliant designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, had transformed the interior of Edinburgh’s Festival Hall into a kind of theatrical agora—an open apron stage flanked by four central pillars, as simple as it was ingenious. Tanya would join Dr. Guthrie on his trip to “Beaverland.” The doctor (who much preferred “Tony” to the more high-flown “Tyrone”) was, to say the least, a hilariously entertaining companion on any trip, but until you knew the man, he would remain lofty, remote, the quintessential loner. Like most true innovators, he detested being thought of as fashionable and when his own triumphs became overly popular with press and public, rather than bask in that glory, he knew it was time to move on—the further afield the better. He was as much at home at Israel’s Habima or later at his own theatres in Australia and Minneapolis as he had been at the Vic. Wildly eccentric, caring not a hoot what he wore (old running shoes in church—that kind of thing), he blissfully roamed the earth in search of new battle grounds, toujours, un voyageur sans baggage, just his own special genius to declare.

  Patterson’s accidental timing was perfect. Weary of metropolitan sophistry and fed up with trendsetters, the Good Doctor longed once again to be amongst raw undiscovered talent, unshackled from convention, so, brimming with fire, enthusiasm and a full heart, he welcomed this tiny chink of chance to conquer a new world.

  They descended from Olympus—the three tall Graces—Tanya, Tony and Judy. Judy had, it seems, been Tony’s wife since childhood, a mere inch or two shorter than her towering husband, just as eccentric and a striking cross between a Celtic goddess and Edith Sitwell. It seemed the Goddess had invented chain-smoking, for pack after pack were inhaled and consumed daily. In the midst of many of Judy’s amusing anecdotes (as I was to witness later) she would invariably halt in midsentence as a series of hacking coughs like thunderclaps seized her, wracking her whole body in massive spasms. The room would freeze, poised, terrified, in fear for her very life—until the fit finally ceased and a nonplussed Judy would casually pick up precisely where she had left off as if nothing at all had occurred.

  Out from a great cloud of Judy’s smoke emerged the little town of Stratford. They fell for it at once. They fell for Tom’s dream. They fell for Tom. They even fell for Tom’s tiny group of followers who would one day become the Board, the best board anyone could ever want—not exactly equipped with the greatest clout and connections in the world but blessed with the kind of guts, faith, intelligence and passion that money couldn’t buy. There they were—Alf and Dama Bell, Archdeacon Lightbourn, Mr. Showalter and good Ol’ Dave Ray—their uplifted faces telling the whole story, ready to go to work, ready to go to any lengths for their new messiah, ready and willing, waiting for the Word. The Word came—and everything spun into action.

  Money! Raise it! Going to need a lot of it. You’ll get rejected—never mind—rise above! That hill overlooking the river? That’s where it’ll stand; not to worry, you’ve already got your swans. Dig a hole— make it a semicircle like an amphitheatre. Tanya will design it. Then we’ll put a tent over the whole thing—cheaper that way. If no one here knows about tents, we’ll get that chap from Chicago—Skip Manley—that his name? I’ll choose the plays and the actors, but you’ll need a star; I’ll find one—ditto, a lady warhorse. I’ll bring a manager from London, Cecil Clarke—v. good at running things—he’ll start us off, then train the locals to take over. Don’t forget costumes—find a space—gather every seamstress you can. I’ll send Ray Diffen, best cutter there is—he’ll make ’em. Tanya will design ’em; v. essential—give jobs to the locals—stir them up, enthuse them. They’ll love it; and whatever you do, remember—get the town behind you. It’s all going to be theirs you know—back in a few months—good luck!

  Left to right: Judy Guthrie, Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch, three tall legends

  Tony was true to his word. He delivered the goods and the goods arrived intact. From Blighty came Sir Alec Guiness, gung ho to take on Richard Crookback—ditto, Irene Worth for All’s Well That Ends Well; Dougie Campbell, a gruff Scot from the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre who you could trust with your life, would take charge of major characters and be Tony’s chief whip. Cecil Clarke (the new manager), Ray Diffen and of course, Tanya, followed hard upon an assembled band of top Canadian talent, including my old pals Bob Goodier and Don Harron, were waiting to welcome them. The race was on!

  Tanya’s stage and the tent going up—will it all be ready?

  Rehearsals and building took place simultaneously, the noise was deafening—actors in mufflers and duffle coats, their lips chapped and blue trying to mouth iambic pentameter as the bitter April winds whistled under the tarpaulins—Tony like a demented Toscanini barking commands and beating time. Shapes were beginning to emerge—the ensemble was slowly forming a personality and style of its own, and Tanya’s platform had already assumed a timeless dignity. There was a long way to go, but enthusiasm showed no signs of flagging when, suddenly, disaster! Everything came to a halt. No more money! The town cynics, egged on by rumours, chanted, “Told you so—told you it wouldn’t last!” Everyone went into shock—everyone, that is, except Tony, who tore about like some possessed emu screeching, “Rise above! On! On!” as Judy huddled in a backseat somewhere nonplussed and stoic as ever—a lighthouse surrounded by an ocean of cigarette butts. It was hard to rise above, there was no getting away from it—all building had ceased, the decision to abort was at hand, the time was out of joint, the race was done.

  Then something remarkable happened. Whether it was Tanya’s unfinished Doric columns bathed in moonlight silhouetted against the night sky that evoked the aura of ancient Greece and a promise of glory, one will never know; but the spirit of Marathon had undoubtedly descended, for the foreman, Oliver Gaffney, offered to finish without pay, and the workers came slowly back. High up on a rigging, Skip Manley, wearing his olive wreath proudly if slightly askew, called down, “We’ll finish yer tent for ya—pay us when ya can!”

  The games were on. The athletes had left the palaestra and had gone onto the field; the race was resumed—the torches passed—the finishing line was in sight; and so, on the evening of the thirteenth of July, 1953, a fanfare of blaring trumpets greeted a large, eager but somewhat apprehensive international audience. If you searched carefully amongst them, you’d have found Alf and Dama Bell, Archdeacon Lightbourn, Mr. Showalter and good Ol’ Dave Ray, battle wearied, with one long powerful story to tell; and, oh yeah, there was Tom Patterson, looking kinda funny again, his dream waiting for him, just around the corner. And whose big limo was that drivin’ up with flags flyin’ and an escort? Why, by God, if it wasn’t the governor gen. himself getting out and the lieutenant governor and the mayor! Hordes of critics and journalists from Great Britain, the U.S. of A. and Canada were pushing their way toward the doors, some of ’em wondering why the hell they’d been sent to the sticks. But, once inside, they sat waiting, humbled and spellbound by the purity of the noble structure Tanya had created. Somewhere up on the hill behind a cannon boomed—a hushed silence fell over the multitude—the long, low resonant sound of a gong gave the signal—the runners came out into the light and the finest damn classical repertory on the whole North American continent was up and away.

  “This small town has gone so giddy with success that it doesn’t bother to turn the street lights off in the daytime.”

  —WALTER KERR, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  “The Stratford Festival of Canada has been born with a silver spoon in its mouth.”

  —THE CHICAGO AMERICAN

  “This is the sort of stage that lovers of Shakespeare have often dreamed about and seldom seen.”

  —BROOKS ATKINSON, THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “The most exciting night in Canadian theatre. The Guthrie touch has not failed to summon scene
s of momentous splendour.”

  —HERBERT WHITTAKER,

  TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

  “The town is still trying to accustom itself to the idea that something possibly unique in North America has happened within its bounds.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  And for beloved Tanya, the heroine of the hour:

  “Tanya Moiseiwitsch, a designer whose special interest is in open platform work and has given her mobile figures such grace and strength you begin to wonder why anyone even bothered to invent scenery.”

  —WALTER KERR, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  FAR AWAY, deep in Manhattan’s theatre district seated at Patsy and Karl’s Bar, I was busy digesting all this when my heart jumped. More than anything I suddenly wanted to be there. Funny, wasn’t it? All my young life I’d tried running away from home to get the attention of the big world elsewhere. Now, all at once, the big world’s attention was on the home I’d just run away from.

  Like everyone else, I had already strutted my stuff long ago for Dr. Guthrie in a boardroom at my old school—Montreal High. My friend Dick Gilbert and I had chosen Brutus and Cassius’s famous tent scene as our audition piece and had given it all we had for the great director. We were quite confident—there were no hitches—I know we were good. I’m quite sure he thought so too, for he was most charitable and complimentary. It is a sad irony, however, that one’s own hometown is possibly the last place one should ever look for support. Due to my wayward escapades as a youth there, I had gained for myself a fairly tarnished reputation. A quite powerful aging radio producer who often employed me and with whom Dr. Guthrie had consulted concerning local talent clearly was not my ally. So convinced was he that I’d been doing “baddies” with his favourite lady soap opera star and mistress of many an organ-backed moon, this Judas of Montreal willfully proceeded to brand me a womanizer, a libertine, a drunk, totally irresponsible, undisciplined and a black influence on any company. This all sounded most exciting. Under other circumstances, I only wished it had been true. True or not, my report card had been taken seriously—I was turned down flat, not just the first year but the second and third as well!