In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  Because he lived in Sarasota, Budd Schulberg started importing all his friends from that town and putting them in the film. For some story purpose, I can’t for the life of me remember what, he hired part of the Ringling Brothers circus. They were marvellous people, tough hardcore professionals, devoted to their work, their various skills handed down generation to generation. There was a girl in the troupe whose specialty was to hang from the high wire solely with her teeth and perform all sorts of hair-raising calisthenics high above the ground without a net. From a distance she appeared a tiny graceful sprite—up close she was a huge woman built like a decathlon champion, rippling muscles sculpting her arms and legs.

  Well, for some strange reason she got a crush on me, the poor deluded thing. I can’t think why—she probably thought I was some superstar. I was terrified; she was much too much woman for me or any other man, for that matter. And those teeth! Those powerful fangs—petrifying. Eons before Peter Benchley ever thought of his book, we were already calling her “Jaws.” She followed me everywhere. B.J., brother John and Falk acted as my bodyguards and spies: “Look out, she’s coming down the street—duck!” I’d jump into the front seat of my Thunderbird convertible with our little mascot, an adorable black-and-white mutt, a stray, who had adopted us and would do absolutely anything he was told. I would put him in the driver’s seat with his two paws on the wheel, me on the floor under the dashboard steering from below and we slowly glided out of town. It was my only means of escape. No one could see me at all, just the dog, all alone, driving the car. This had been B.J.’s inspired staging. Sometimes the crew would play diabolical tricks such as placing Jaws right in my line of vision during a take. Those unforgivable swine! There she stood, grinning at me, with all those thousands of teeth, ready to snap.

  At last the day came when the circus left town along with my erstwhile somewhat empty-handed paramour. Although I’d been spared possible permanent teeth marks, I kind of missed this Powerful Katrinka and the excitement of the chase.

  Budd, his cup of kindness brimming over, kept inviting more of his friends down to watch the shooting, including several pugilists (Budd is an incurable fight fan), among them the famous Roger Donahue. He also had the good taste to employ a young dark-haired beauty from New Orleans to play the part of Memory Mellons, a half-breed native who wasn’t required to speak or be spoken to but only to be looked upon. This turned out to be no chore, for with what she had to offer, and what she was wearing, she became known to all of us as “Mammory Mellons.” Her real name was Cynthia and she was eighteen or thereabouts. Sometime after the Everglades saga was just a mammory, Cynthia and I became good friends and to this day, we still are.

  Peter Falk turned out to be a wonderful ally and supporter of the Manon-des Grieux opposition team and kept our spirits from flagging with his cynical offbeat humour. Peter had only recently become an actor. He had started out in life, unbelievably, as an accountant. From an accident as a youth he wore a glass eye and just before a take he would call out to the makeup man, “Heh! you forgot to spray de eye! Spray de eye for Chrissakes!” He also loved to shock every now and then by popping the eye out and placing it on a rock as he gleefully watched people, suddenly overtaken with nausea, about to keel over. Something told us he’d be a star one day.

  On a Saturday morning, our day off, while I was dozing in a chair on the club balcony, the delightful sound of clinking ice roused me from my torpor. Budd sauntered up with his usual morning vodka in an oversized milkshake carton. “I’ve g-g-g-gotta—I’ve hired a launch and we’re g-g-g-oing—we’re off to an island miles out in the gulf. They say a hermit lives out there all alone with his dogs. C-c-c-come on then. G-G-Gypsy Rose, B-B-B.J. and Stuart are all coming. So let’s g-go!”

  Peter Falk, “Heh, makeup! Spray the eye, guys!”

  It took forever, but at last the island appeared in the distance. We anchored and waded ashore. A scruffy old man was standing on the beach while two unidentifiable mongrels ran up and down yapping at us. The old man’s eyes were like deep holes, and he stared at us as if he’d never seen another human. He said nothing but beckoned us to follow him. It was a tiny island—no evidence of a hut or anything; he obviously slept with his dogs in the shelter of the rocks. However, there was a verdancy about the place, so we concluded he must exist on berries and what fruit and vegetable growth it had to offer. There was very little else to see so we told him it was time to go, thanked him and bade him farewell. None of us knew what language the man spoke, if indeed he ever spoke at all. After all someone so unused to people had no need of speech. He may indeed have been mute since birth. As we started wading out to the boat, he suddenly spoke. His voice was a mixture of Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan:

  “Yoush-goin’ back-t’town-ish-ya?”

  “Yes,” we answered.

  “Could-yoush-gimme-a lift?”

  “But,” we all stammered at once, “you-you-you-you’re a—you’re a herm—herm …”

  He interrupted us. “It getch awful lonely out here sometimesh.”

  We took him on board. As we left the island, the two dogs ran around in circles on the shore, barking their hearts out. Gypsy and I stood at the railing in the boat’s stern watching the island become a tiny speck. We couldn’t see the dogs anymore but we could still hear them—barking away faintly in the distance. “It’s so sad,” I ventured. “I bet those dogs are going to miss him like hell. That’s what that barking is; they’re saying, ‘Come back, come back!’” “They’re not saying, ‘Come back, come back,’ you schmuck,” corrected Gypsy firmly; “they’re yelling, ‘Phoney hermit! Phoney hermit! Phoney hermit!’”

  To while the days away and relieve the idiotic chaos, B.J., Falk and I would very often wait until dusk and take one of those flying boats that skim over land and water far out into the lagoons. There we would stop the boat and sit in awed silence as we watched nature triumph over man. Millions upon millions of water birds—herons, egrets, bitterns, tropical exotic wild fowl, every known variety flying home to their water beds for the night. This was what the Everglades was all about. This was their kingdom. No notice was taken of us; we were invisible, insignificant. Those evenings made us forget not just our silly world but the whole silly world—a magical and cruel reminder of just how little we matter.

  Gypsy Rose—a “pro” to her fingertips

  Then on our return home to the club, we’d sit on the balcony and Burl Ives would take up his guitar and sing songs in those special mellow tones of which he was the only master. The ease with which he weaved his spell as he gently rippled off “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care” or “A little bitty tear let me down” made one feel that he alone had invented folklore. Even the fireflies hovered longer and closer.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER BUD in our midst (with one d) who was warden for the Everglades Park. He was also our technical advisor, and Bud Kirk’s job was to watch over us, make sure we didn’t drown or get swallowed up by quicksand. It seemed a trifle odd when Burl Ives and I were doing our final confrontation scene, wading chest-deep in alligator-infested waters, that Mr. Kirk, who kept calling out instructions such as, “I think you should move more upstream; there’s less chance of gators that way,” was sitting on a chair, fully dressed, on a bank several yards away from any danger. Was there something wrong with this picture?

  He did have his useful side, however. He knew just about every rock, cranny and cave in the surrounding islands. Outside the Everglades themselves was a spit of land called Chokoloskee Island. In the nineteenth century it had been inhabited by poor Polish outcasts who had copulated with the natives there including some of the Seminole tribe, producing illegitimate half-breed offspring. These offspring in turn intermarried, transforming the island into a haven of inbreeding and incest. They had eked out a living selling egret feathers, pirating and robbing the mainland. By now, however, most of them had become pretty lazy, content to hang around dealing with trouble only if it came their way.

  A poss
e of them had been hired to play the villainous egret killers in the movie. Anne Roth, the cute, young, stylish costume designer, who always smoked from a cigarette holder and who would become the Anne Roth of Hollywood and Oscar fame, didn’t have to worry. The clothes these crackers wore daily hadn’t changed since the century began and, by the look and smell of them, didn’t need to be broken down either. The Chokoloskee boys had a strange custom they couldn’t wait to practice. For a fortnight or so they would leave their women and go off on a huntin’, fishin’, drinkin’ spree of unusual violence. At night they would engage in a ritual they called lip fighting. They would lie together on the ground like lovers and furiously bite each other’s lips until they bled profusely and swelled to an enormous size. They would hold on in this death-lock sometimes for hours on end, ominously suggesting a kind of cannibalistic sex.

  Tosh Brown, the leader of the pack, was rather more passive than the rest and tried to keep a semblance of law and order among them. At least he could read whereas the rest of them were pretty illiterate. Tosh played himself in the film. He also sang rather nicely some incomprehensible local dirges while accompanying himself on the guitar.

  There was a little eating hole in the marshes just across from Chokoloskee Island on the mainland. Dreadfully ramshackle, it was built on stilts and had cardboard walls, but it offered some of the best fish ’n’ chips I’ve ever consumed. It was also the Chokoloskee boys’ favorite haunt. We began to dine there regularly, bringing our own booze. Bud Kirk insisted on accompanying us even if he didn’t partake. Though you never saw it, he always packed a gun. One Saturday night, eight of us had arrived there feeling no pain. To make things more stylish, we decided to dress up in our Sunday best. B.J. kidnapped James, the bartender at the Rod and Gun, to come along in his white coat and serve us the club’s champagne throughout the meal. James couldn’t have had a better time—chuckling away most of the evening—he got such a kick out of this performance.

  Nicholas Ray—an immensely gifted maverick

  The joint that night was packed with the Chokoloskee clan. Our table was in front, and right behind us sat Tosh Brown and his cousin, one of the seediest-looking male creeps I’ve ever set eyes on. “Coz” started singing in a very bad off-key monotone some ghastly drunken madrigal. He kept on and on like a broken record—the whole room now forced to listen. I heard Tosh make a swift movement behind us. I didn’t want to look. He had obviously grabbed Coz by the throat; I heard Tosh say very slowly, very gently, “You stop that now, ya heah me? Ah, don’ laik that sawng.” There was quiet for a while then Coz began again. Our own table was now getting quite rowdy—we’d forgotten the incident; more champagne corks popped, and everything was getting back to normal when suddenly Bud Kirk appeared from nowhere and in an urgent whisper said, “We’re leaving now—pay up and let’s get outta here.” “But,” we protested, “we haven’t even started.” “Do as I say—now! I’ll explain later.” We paid up, walked down the rickety steps, Bud herding us all the way to our cars which were parked some twenty-five yards up a dirt road. We could still hear that awful wailing sound emanating from Tosh’s cousin. Then we heard a shot, followed by silence—an awful stillness. It was broken a moment later by the whirring of a great flock of exotic birds flying away from the surrounding trees. Clearly, they too had had quite enough.

  A few days later, another violent incident occurred. Manon, it seems, had tried to kill Nick. In the dead of night she had left their bed, Nick still sleeping, got into the big Cadillac convertible, backed up several yards then gunned it at full speed straight through the wall of their bedroom. If, seconds before Nick hadn’t got up to pee, he would surely have been a dead man. We saw the cabin the next morning which looked like a collapsed accordion.

  Manon disappeared never to be seen again and Nick, badly shaken, did not report for duty with much regularity, so a few days later he was dismissed. What gave the whole farce a bizarre ending was that when Nick was being driven to the airport, he lay on the backseat so that no one would see him go.

  Years later in London I got to know this bright, talented maverick a lot better when we were both staying at the Connaught Hotel. He was a different person altogether and we had such a pleasant time, never once referring to those days in the swampland. I still felt a certain guilt over my uncooperative behavior toward him, but he’d obviously forgiven me or else had more than likely blocked the whole weird experience from his mind. He continued to do some fine work, in Europe mostly, and characteristically spent the remainder of his reclusive days at the end of the world on an island off the northernmost tip of Denmark.

  BUDD SCHULBERG, Charlie Maguire and Bill Garrity finished the movie, but it was all a bit late—nothing much they could do. Gypsy Rose Lee, her engagement completed, stayed on as a sort of wardrobe woman emeritus, mending and repairing costumes. “June and I were taught to do this when we were both on the road with mother. We sewed; we stitched; we made all our own costumes.” This valiant lady, a true professional, had most certainly learned all the tricks of the trade.

  B.J., Memory Mellons, Falk and I were all that was left of the group except for the little mascot who, for laughs, still drove the Thunderbird with me on the floor steering. And then the inevitable day arrived when we would bid adieu to the old Rod and Gun. We absolutely emptied the place. James, the kidnapped bartender, was broken up. “What am I gonna do now?” he moaned. No, things would never be the same. The Hermit, who hated being alone, now had a permanent address in Everglades City with his two dogs, and the snake-man who was always getting beaten up in bars and always drunk spent most of his time in jail. He’s probably still there.

  My sidekick, the indescribable B.J., went back to Vermont and his manuscript The River, Memory Mellons to New Orleans and Budd Schulberg, the film under his arm, left for the nearest editing room where he would try to extract some sense from the botched-up mosaic of his story. And me? With my tail between my legs, I went back to Manhattan and the real snakes of Madison Avenue with whom I had always felt far more comfortable to begin with.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  For the next hectic weeks, nay months, I stewed and fretted over what in God’s name to call my pixie offspring. Of course it mattered not a tinker’s damn what she might want. After all she only had to live with it for the rest of her life. Why should she have a choice? I had always been rather partial to masculine nomenclature for girls, convinced that it lent a certain flair and challenged them to be feminine at the same time. I especially liked Sidney, Hilary, Steven, Frances, Leslie, Georgie—names of that ilk. This would of course be her middle name; the principal one, without question, would have to be ultra-feline.

  Tammy wanted Amanda. She liked the aristocratic English sound. She also loved the Amanda Coward had created for Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives. She was to play it herself more than once, winning a Tony for it. Well, if it was to be Amanda it was okay by me, though I was fearful she’d be called “Mandy” for short. But what boyish appellation, which I seemed to think so stylish, could complement it? When I badgered friends for suggestions, some jeered at me; others merely looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Jack Warden scoffed, “What about Howard or Marvin? How about Moishe?”

  Then I remembered a fresh-faced beauty who once served as a very young apprentice at the American Shakespeare Theatre that crazy summer when it began. She was sixteen or seventeen, was madly in love with a handsome young actor, Peter Donat, whom she later married, and her name was Michael Learned. (Yes the same Michael Learned from the Waltons who became such a fine actress.) There it was—Michael! And it sat perfectly on her; God knows there was nothing tomboyish about Miss Learned! So, screaming bloody murder as she was dipped into the font by Archdeacon Lightbourne at St. James Anglican in Stratford, Ontario, one beautiful but very noisy afternoon, our offspring was christened Amanda Michael Plummer—satisfying all and sundry.

  Jason Robards, Jr., one of the very best Hotspurs I’v
e seen

  But there must have been some mysterious potion lurking in the rough waters of the font that day; some “eye of newt” or “tongue of dog,” for a little demon grew up inside Amanda that would bring forth in her later youth a talent, deeply intense, utterly original, which could, if it had a mind to, stir up the “terrors of the earth.”

  WELL, VERY NEARLY ALL the cracks had gathered for the fray. The little church was fairly bursting with joy, and with her christening, so was the summer christened. It was a summer of children, of comrades and some pretty proud work—it wasn’t all spit and polish, but, by God, it was alive.

  Rare words! brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come! O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!

  —FALSTAFF (HENRY IV, PART I)

  Jason Robards, after another triumphant O’Neill performance as Jamie in the world premiere of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, drove up from New York in his “Red Ding-Dong,” a large, loud fire-engine red station wagon. He brought along his dad, Jason, Sr., a delightful charmer who had once been a leading man in Hollywood silents. An old naval salt, he was instantly dubbed the “Admiral,” Max Helpmann, another navy man, was the “Commander,” Jason, Jr., the “Captain” and I guess I must have been the ship’s MD, for they called me “Doctor.”

  Jason gave us his Hotspur, and Doug Campbell was a rich and robust Falstaff, both in Henry I V, Part I; Tammy relinquished her musical-star status momentarily for the small comic role of Dorcas in The Winter’s Tale. The West End star, Eileen Herlie, a warm and brilliant Scottish lass who had been Olivier’s Queen Mum in his film of Hamlet was Paulina from the same play and also Beatrice to my Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. It was playing Benedick that freed me from all outward influence and for the first time I was able to find a trust in myself. Michael Langham’s witty and very human production received unanimous praise on both sides of the border and we, the actors, didn’t do too badly ourselves—our ensemble had never been stronger. For a moment our little northern company appeared unchallenged anywhere. To top it all off, the French brought back their Molière for a brief but exhausting visit and the Press Club, our only after-hours green room, rang out louder and longer than all the carillons of Notre Dame.