In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

“Cairtinly sairs.” (She stood there, stoic, immobile.)

  “Could you get it for us now please? We’re parched.”

  “Ah noo sairs a kin nai du that forr ye masell.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll huff t’ tailaphun doon stairs.”

  “Right,” we said, picking up the telephone.

  “Ah noo sairs, y’ kinna tailaphun doon yet sairs, y’ll haff t’wait.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Cuz a haff t’go doonstairs t’ansair the tailaphun.”

  We knew then we were in store for a lot of charm but a lot of trouble.

  Everything was swiftly taking shape—the two Jeans and their henchmen had located one or two acceptable French restaurants in town. We were busy getting used to our new stage, the old Assembly Hall which Tanya Moiseiwitsch had transformed into a most impressive playing area; everything was a-bustle with activity. The festival’s manager was a tall, pompous young reed called Ponsonby. Academically snobbish, he had the patronizing manner of a petty civil servant. He probably had every good reason but he took an instant dislike to me. Ponsonby’s first name, believe it or not, was Harry and I couldn’t wait for the dress rehearsal at which he was present to let it rip:

  The game’s afoot:

  Follow your spirit and upon this charge

  Cry “God for Harry Ponsonby and St. George!”

  Our company’s other offering was Tyrone Guthrie’s amazing production of Oedipus (surely one of this century’s most original) with Douglas Campbell, William Hutt and Douglas Rain giving particularly shining performances. Together, Henry and Oedipus were just one more testament to Tanya’s genius as a designer—her extraordinary uses of fabric, her courageous blending of colours, her insistence on creating clothes, not costumes. As always, she offered a brilliant study in contrasts from the intensely human look of the homespun English and the over-popinjayed elegance of the French in Henry to the tall, stark figures in Oedipus mounted on stilts beneath their gowns, the masks of birds and animals concealing their faces, making of the tragedy a pagan ritual of solemn barbaric grandeur.

  It is not surprising that Tanya has taught and influenced some of today’s top designers both in theatre and film, who gave anything then to work as her assistants. She had made me a special Order of the Garter for Henry to wear on his tights, just below the knee. I could never, for the life of me, remember which was the right side up—until one night the Princess Royal, aging Princess Mary, came backstage all alone except for two of her detectives. She was most complimentary but explained she really had come back because she wished to show me how I should wear my garter. I was still in costume and she asked me to put my foot on a chair so she could reach my knee. The old lady then removed her gloves and began working away at the offending garter, twisting and turning it until she was quite satisfied she had made the correct adjustment. I bowed my eternal gratitude and she left with the sweetest smile, quite content that royal protocol had been maintained.

  Edinburgh, even at festival time, closed pretty early so relaxing or partying after a performance was not made easy. The only place where drinks and food flowed with any regularity was the Press Club. But what to do after it shut down? Uncle Exeter and I soon found that our good Ol’ Caledonian Hotel had the answer. They held to a strangely archaic rule which forbade you to drink in your rooms after midnight but allowed you to imbibe all through the night in the hotel lobby and as long as you were a guest you could invite any number of derelicts you wished—comme c’était bizarre! Robert and I began to ask the odd friend back, but pretty soon actors from every visiting company in town had caught on, and there was a fresh free-for-all each night as the numbers increased. Unfortunately, as Uncle Exeter and I were the only residents, a great majority of the bar bills landed on our tab. It took months afterward to sort the whole thing out but Robert and I were for the most part forced to split the expense. Why we never hit skid row, I cannot fathom.

  One morning around ten (with only a couple of hours’ sleep under my belt), the telephone rang. I woke in a haze, reached out and knocked it onto the floor. “Yes?” I barked angrily, leaning over and shouting down into the receiver.

  Bob Goodier—the great Satisfier

  “This is the Countess of Harrington speaking. I’ve just had a delightful letter from your aunt who told me you’re here. Can you come up and spend next weekend with us in the country?”

  “Oh, fuck off, Bob,” I said. “I’m trying to get some goddamn sleep!” Robert was always playing tricks like that, calling from outside pretending to be someone grand—his idea of a joke. I was groping around to find the cradle so I could hang up when I saw him. There he was, dead to the world, fast asleep and snoring in the next bed. It was too late for redress. That was just one more stately home I wouldn’t be visiting!

  Apart from these wasteful nights and days with a little Shakespeare thrown in for good measure, I was not unmindful of my surroundings: the somewhat sad stone beauty of Edinburgh—its graceful grey streets, its wondrous castle, the mystery of Holyroodhouse—but there was little time to venture beyond its gates. I reconciled myself that I would have to wait for some future opportunity to be hypnotized by the mists and rugged beauty of the Scottish countryside from whence my forebears had come.

  Now that we’d been given a few days off, Robert, Jean, a brace of females and I all made an immediate beeline for Londontown and a busman’s holiday. It was a rich, full few days. The whole face of the theatre was changing, as was London and the country. It was a must, therefore, to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, one of the leaders of the new trend, with Mary Ure, Kenneth Haigh and a young Alan Bates in the cast. Other waspish trendsetters were Angus Wilson’s The Mulberry Bush about prewar progressives losing touch with reality and Joan Littlewood’s wonderful production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, a remarkable play by a remarkable new playwright. Geraldine Page weaved her particular magic in The Rainmaker, and I was able to renew my acquaintance with that talented and zany lady.

  But what made the London trip so memorable, that obliterated everything in sight and would live in my memory for the rest of my life was the Berliner Ensemble in three of their great Brechtian productions Mutter Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Trumpets and Drums. Never before or since have I witnessed such perfection in ensemble playing—every player a star actor in his own right. Brecht had just died that very summer, and his widow, Helene Weigel, had taken up the reins. Weigel, a tiny woman with the bone structure of Martha Graham, was a force of nature and a great actress in the bargain. Seared into my mind forever is the unforgettable moment in Mutter Courage when her son is executed. She suddenly opened her mouth to its fullest, held it open for some seconds, but made absolutely no sound at all. The effect was devastating, for it was as if all the blood had left her and her face had become a mask. It was a numb, completely mechanical reaction, yet we the audience screamed for her nonetheless—we supplied the missing sound within.

  “Skepticism moves mountains” was Brecht’s dictum and Epic Theatre was his platform. His theatrical technique as a writer-director was to pick a quarrel with the spectator—to incite argument, even alienation; he detested reverence from the public, and little attempt was made at realistic illusion. He wanted to remind you that no matter how moved you could become, you were still sitting in a theatre and it was all effect. Watching Ernst Busch, the chef in Mutter Courage, peeling potatoes with the speed of light as he tried to tell a sad story, or Eckhardt Schall, that fabulous young German actor, do his violent sword dance as cleanly as any samurai warrior, were enriching, breathtaking experiences. In Caucasian Chalk Circle, the ensemble baffled and dazzled one even further by illustrating they could perform in two contrasting styles at the same time, the realistic German School and the high pantomime style of the Peking Opera.

  Just as critics Clement Scott and Bernard Shaw had anticipated the new wave of Ibsen at the turn of the century, so Eric Bentley in America and Kenn
eth Tynan in Britain heralded the importance of Brecht’s impact upon the Western world. Writing of Mutter Courage, for instance, Tynan states:

  … the production achieved a new kind of theatrical beauty—and the broad canvas and the eagle’s eye view of humanity were restored to European drama after too long an absence.

  At any rate, I had found a new force in the theatre to worship, and with the clanging of Asiatic bells and horns, the splashes of vivid color on vast, bleak canvases and the image of that brave gnomelike creature dragging her little cart across the battleground forever branded in my memory, I went back to Scotland and the last few performances of Henry—a chastened, humbled servant who now felt very small indeed.

  Confidence gradually returned when, swept along on the glorious tide of Shakespeare’s verse, I began to enjoy myself once again. But it was all too brief, for now the hour had come to put Henry Plantagenet in mothballs for the time being. It was not good-bye, for at various intervals throughout my life the old warhorse was to cross my path and invite me to take up arms once again. Pistol said it all for me:

  The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,

  A lad of life, an imp of fame;

  Of parents good, of fist most valiant:

  I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heartstring

  I love the lovely bully.

  Looking back to those days in the midfifties and their all-too-vivid growing pains, I am nothing but eternally grateful to Harry and his followers: “The poor condemned English” lads that made up such a happy band of brothers—“the confident and over-lusty French” whose joie de vivre I was fortunate to share, and the brilliant Scotsman, Michael Langham, who had made it all possible to begin with and who never once wavered in his trust; for they all gave me a fighting spirit I’d never known before and helped bring down the curtain on my youth.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SETTLE DOWN? NOT BLOODY LIKELY!

  Tammy lost no time. She had found and furnished a home for us both when I returned from the land of the kilt. It was a charming house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village just a couple of doors away from ye olde Waverly Inn. We had the top two and a half floors, our own entrance and use of the garden. Her wily charms had managed to persuade the owners from whom we rented (a remarkably docile pair) to retire to the basement apartment where they burrowed molelike, only occasionally surfacing for air. Diagonally opposite was a convenient garage several stories high (corner of Greenwich and Bank) with private self-operating elevator, where I could park my sparkling new convertible MG—Tammy had not yet acquired the objects of her taste (gull-wing Mercedes and Ferrari). The garage was used by a variety of citizenry and several members of our profession, including my friend with the Gilbert and Sullivan monocle, Martyn Greene.

  In the wee hours one morning after some late partying, Mr. Greene drove his car into the elevator in order to park it on an upper floor. As the elevator ascended, slower than any tortoise, Martyn decided to get out, monocle and all, and look under the chassis for a suspected fuel leak. Stretched out on all fours, his legs dangling over the elevator’s edge, he suddenly heard a crunching sound and a searing pain shot through him. One of his legs had got caught between the wall of the building and the lift and the crunch was the elevator jolting to a dead stop. There was no one about in the entire building or in the area, for that matter—it was so late. For hours, Martyn must have been calling for help, lying as he was, pinioned, unable to free his leg.

  An eternity had passed before a man drove in, found the elevator stuck on the fourth story, left his car and walked up to see what the trouble was. Looking down from above, he saw the awful predicament Martyn was in and managed to climb down onto the elevator itself. By ringing the down button, he released Martyn’s leg and pulled him to safety. Martyn was now delirious, could hardly speak, and the man, who luckily turned out to be a doctor, set about to examine the mangled leg. To his horror he saw at once that gangrene had set in and was spreading fast. There was no time, no choice—it had to be done—he must remove the leg now, right here in the elevator, or it would be too late. He quietly informed Martyn of this, apologized, said he had very little equipment with him, only a knife and no anesthetic except for a full bottle of brandy in the car. Would Martyn be very brave and give him permission? It was life or death! Martyn agreed.

  The very nickel of a modern Major General

  Several weeks later, I saw Martyn at Sardi’s bar, chipper as ever with his sawed-off leg, his crutches and monocle, looking for all the world as much the “Ruler of the Queen’s Navee” he always was. The medical authorities had barred the doctor from his profession, claiming he should never have performed such a delicate operation under such reckless and barbaric circumstances. The fact that he had saved a man’s life didn’t enter into it. For the next several years, Martyn fought to repair that doctor’s reputation and did not flinch till he had done so.

  Not every happening on Bank Street was as sensational but it was a fairly accident-prone area nonetheless. Soon after the Greene incident, I carelessly put my arm through a glass door, blood spurting out as if I’d opened a hydrant, and if St. Vincent’s Hospital had not been just around the corner, I could have quite easily bled to death. George C. Scott turned up at our doorstep one morning at 4:30 a.m. looking most sinister and as usual dripping blood from head to toe. “I want a shower,” he rasped in typical George C. fashion. Tam, whom he’d known at college, hid under the bedclothes while I showed him the bathroom, and after the last of the blood had washed down the shower hole à la Psycho, and he’d rested a little, I drove him to his television rehearsal.

  Nothing much else would have made local headlines, apart from a few knockdown humdinger fights between Tam and me, except that our Trinidad maid, Dessa, who quite obviously was obsessed with voodoo and would, during thunderstorms or at any given hour depending on certain vibrations, insist on lying supine on the floor in a state of transcendent karma. One day I came down the stairs to find several rather elderly relatives of Tammy’s from Boston sitting in the living room staring down at the hapless form of Dessa lying across the rug in front of them, moaning like a sick cow. “The weather must be changing” was my lame explanation.

  Tammy’s talents did not necessarily embrace the kitchen. I had once taken her to Henri Soule’s superb Le Pavillon, where she ordered bacon and eggs. She could, however, if roused, rustle up a mean Sole Amandine or Véronique, but that was it! That was her limit. For a brief spell, she took domestic delight in cooking for her “man” at home, so we alternated these two culinary delicacies with such furious regularity that I began having recurring nightmares of being chased by oversized soles hurling giant almonds and grapes at me till I screamed for mercy. Soon Tammy became bored and there were no more home-cooked meals—the nightmares ceased, and we took to eating out. We had already begun to drift apart—we were seldom alone—but I thoroughly enjoyed being with Tammy when we could be together. She was one funny lady, a madcap, her eccentricities were delightfully catching, and she was, after all, carrying our child.

  There was a Baldwin grand in the living room upon which I could pound to my heart’s content on those lonely nights while “she” was busy doing her act at the Plaza or The Blue Angel. Her career as a cabaret-chanteuse-comedienne was rapidly zooming and already she was earning considerably more than I, so a kind of competitive game began to be semiconsciously played between us. Her cracked voice and farcical timing made her unique along the nightclub circuit and the little, quirky ski-jump nose gave her a kind of childlike pathos that, for a while, put her in a class by herself. We were two fans observing and admiring each other at forty paces—hardly the stuff to secure a union; we were having too much fun enjoying our separate ascendancies—much too immature to take on the twin responsibilities of marriage and raising a child. We were also far too young.

  There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

  That the colt from old Regret had got away,

&nbs
p; And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound, So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.

  I NEVER HEAR those words of “Banjo” Paterson’s but tears are in my eyes, for they put me in mind of a fella who was forever declaiming them as the two of us lurched from one Gotham bar to another all through the long, warm Babylonian nights. It was not always just us twain, for this descendant of the Pied Piper coted many a rat old and new along the way. I met him for the first time that very winter. We were both in a live television broadcast (most undistinguished)—I played an elegant jewel thief; he was my disreputable but willing tool. The liaison we formed was wonderfully disastrous. The only thing that mattered, of course, was that we became friends for life!

  Jason Robards, Jr., was an angular young man, slightly stooped, who loped rather than walked, was quick and deft in movement like an athlete and possessed even in his young years one of the great craggy faces of memory. Huge, hurt eyes gave him his vulnerability and his popularity. Every woman within wooing distance wanted to coddle him, convert him (from what they knew not) or, at the very least, spare his life, even if it wasn’t in any particular danger. Of course, when he gathered all these qualities together and put them on the stage, the effect was irresistible.

  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.