In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  The London police were wonderfully sympathetic. They drove me back to the Globe Theatre so I could resume my duties in Becket and told me they would drop all charges of inebriated driving. The first two performances I went through the motions as if I were sleep-walking. But people who’d read about the accident started coming backstage to cheer me up—friends and complete strangers both. Van Johnson, who knew Trish and had heard of her plight, was playing Damn Yankees down the street. I didn’t know him at all, but he came back to tell me not to worry. He had had the same operation on his brain, and “Here I am, large as life,” he affirmed with that sunny smile of his. People were so caring and generous, but nothing could stop my anxiety. I called Michael and Helen Langham for advice. “I don’t know what to do. I’m going crazy. The doctors don’t know me; they think I’m just a date of hers—I can’t get any information.” “Call Tibor Szato,” they said. “He knows everybody and everybody knows him. He’ll keep an eye on things.” Tibor was incredible. “Don vurry, Krees. I know zeez doctors. I vill monitor ze whole sing. I vill tell zem you are her fiancé, and I am your spy.”

  They operated and the clot was removed, but though she was still alive, Trish had not come out of her coma. I was going spare. News that Tammy had obtained a Mexican divorce and I was free didn’t exactly cheer me up either. Rex Harrison’s son Noel and his wife, Sarah, looked after me throughout this ordeal. I slept at their place; they would pick me up at the theatre, take me to their house, listen to my ramblings and leave me with a bottle of Scotch so I could drink myself to sleep. They were absolute saints; I’ll never forget them.

  On the third night after the operation, one of the nurses called to say things had not changed. Trish was still unconscious and that was the last I heard—no more information was forthcoming. I was by now feeling no less than suicidal. Instead of going directly to the Harrisons’ after the show, I went on a solitary pub crawl. Noel found me and joined me drink for drink, bless him, as we sloshed our way into the night, ending up around 2:30 a.m. at Alec Stirling’s club. Alec had also been a sympathetic friend and he had given the hospital his telephone number. He was just about to close when the phone rang. “It’s for you,” he said; “it’s urgent.” “Hello?” I began, shaking in every limb. “Ees zat you, Krees?” And in that comforting soothing Hungarian drone like the sound of cellos, Tibor was saying, “Everyteeng’s all right now. Trish just voke up; she vants to live!” Good old Tibor! I could have kissed him. I kissed the phone instead.

  She was moved to yet another hospital, this one on the west side of London where they operated on her jaw. For the first time I was allowed to visit her. She was sitting up in bed beaming from ear to ear, the old and the new. The nurse was correct; the right one had grown perfectly back on—absolutely normal! But she was a sight to behold—bald as a coot (her head had been shaved completely) and her face, which was still enormously swollen, had been skewered by a huge primitive-looking steel contraption, presumably meant to hold her jaw together. She was the spitting image of a Martian with a telephone implant. I don’t suppose she had been able to utter a word to anyone for the longest time, but the moment she saw me she managed to blurt out, “I can get Tokyo on this thing!” Trish was back, all right!

  Many weeks of slow recovery followed and many setbacks. It was like watching a child grow up. Several times they had caught her in the hospital corridor trying to escape with that damnable thing stuck to her face. Once she managed to get as far as the street in her nightie before they hauled her back inside. But the closing of Becket and her final release coincided beautifully. The “telephone” had at last been removed, her hair was growing back in a promising little fuzz and on one rainy afternoon in the cozy chambers at the Marylebone Registry office—I married Trish!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PETER O’TOOLE’S GIFT

  The very next morning I boarded the big iron bird for Canada leaving my bride behind. “The baked meats that furnished forth the marriage tables” had been barely sampled as I sped away toward the younger Stratford, blowing grateful kisses to Peter O’Toole at every lurch of the plane. Michael Langham was about to put together a terrific season with me as Macbeth and O’Toole as Cyrano de Bergerac. But Lawrence of Arabia, bless its overbudgeted heart, still held Peter, along with his raw camel-sored arse, hostage in the African desert. As with most David Lean movies, the end seemed never in sight, so he was forced to pass and I ended up playing de Bergerac! Ah, Peter! May Allah look kindly on you. You gave me King Henry. I won the prize—and now Cyrano! O light of the desert. I’ll clean your sandals and carry your cigarette holders wherever you may go.

  But first, let us brace ourselves against the heavy weather. I am referring to The Tragedy of Macbeth, or the “Scottish Play,” as it is known in our wary profession. The doomed masterpiece spells from the start Trouble in River City. Shrouded in superstition, it is famously cursed. Dire happenings are supposed to occur to anyone involved and usually do, and there is an unspoken rule that an actor who utters the name “Macbeth” or any line from the play in his dressing room must leave the room at once, spit and turn around three times before reentering. My friend Eric Porter, about to rehearse his Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon, was startled out of his wits by a telephone call from England’s head witch—Dame Olwyn, who assured him everything was all right; she had checked, and he could proceed unscathed!

  The Thane of Cawdor, as a role, is fraught with problems, not just supernatural but psychological and physical. There is a well-known theory that a large chunk of the play’s early scenes has been missing for centuries, a chunk which, if ever discovered, might help us better understand Macbeth’s hasty decision and his overly swift journey into darkness. It is, suspiciously, the shortest of all Shakespeare’s plays and the huge transitional leap our protagonist must take from the moment he leaves the three weird sisters is precipitous indeed, almost implausible. It is as if a whole reel of film had been stolen from the lab. Anyway, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

  To add another troublesome ingredient to that greasy cauldron, the Macbeth of medieval Scotland, though highly placed in the land, must have been nothing more than a coarse, brutish peasant warrior—com-pletely uneducated, illiterate—never read a book in his life and who even in his most inebriated state would never be caught spouting such lofty utterances as

  Come, seeling night,

  Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day.

  or

  Pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air.

  It is conceivable that the lowliest Manhattan cabbie from Hell’s Kitchen might pull over for a few moments and hold his customer captive while he recites selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost, but in this instance our author has put into the mouth of his unwashed Highland jock some of the greatest, most soaring poetry ever written. The combo I don’t buy—sorry! To make this futile exercise work is, of course, its eternal challenge and good bloody luck to anyone batty enough to undertake it. With masochistic relish, we actors hurl ourselves into the fray seduced by the majestic verse, hoping to God the audience doesn’t notice our physical shortcomings. As it is, Macbeth would really do best on radio, where the poetry would be isolated, the actors heard and not seen and the listener’s imagination allowed free rein.

  At any rate, with a foolhardy resolve, I squeezed into my Scottish woolens, held my nose and jumped in feet first. I don’t think I was very good. I spoke the verse well because that I can do, but in my desire to stress the Thane’s “vaulting ambition” I became far too neurotic to be a convincing leader and that very ambition Macbeth talks about in my case literally “o’er leapt itself and fell on the other.” I also allowed myself to be dominated far too much by that bullying better half of mine, Lady Macbeth. Thus the story unfolded as a sort of mother-son relationship in the manner of Ibsen’s Ghosts rather than that of a man catapulted into action t
hrough the monstrous gathering strength which his lady had been feeding him.

  Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, with Kate Reid as the missus

  Ellen Terry had described Henry Irving’s look at the end of the play as that of a “famished wolf” and it was just that sort of seething state one must achieve in order to do the Bard’s great horror-drama justice. Also I confess, I was jealous of Kate Reid. It didn’t take me long to realize what a workhorse role Macbeth really is and what a cool “star” part the author gave to his leading lady. She swans in, confident and relatively uncomplicated at various key intervals, wrapping every moment she’s onstage—takes a long pleasant sabbatical in her dressing room and then, after a breathtaking sleepwalking scene, decides to expire comfortably offstage while her poor overworked husband never draws breath, endlessly eulogizing her after she’s gone. The lady has barely exerted herself the entire evening, and has taken all the glory! Thankless bitch!

  Of course, it was a joy to be reunited with dear Kate, my surrogate sister, no matter the circumstances, and she was quite wonderful in the part—a glowingly warm and melting siren on the one hand and a vicious strident viper on the other. Peter Coe, the West End’s new hot young director, had come over from England to stage the play and possibly take over the festival after Langham’s rumoured departure. Heavily influenced by the Berliner Ensemble as was almost everyone at the time, Peter made the production very stark and realistic, punctuated by Germanic lighting characteristic of a Fritz Lang movie. He clearly wanted to emphasize the dank, dour atmosphere of uninviting empty hovels where we sat around on our haunches huddled together in tight little clusters, presumably to warm ourselves from the frigid Scottish air. The whole mise-en-scène had the look of a Breugel painting. His was an interesting take on the play, but lacked the loftiness which I’m afraid was largely my responsibility to supply. However, there were some affecting moments; a tall, striking young lady called Martha Henry, making her Stratford debut, came on with all guns firing as Lady Macduff. Her grief over the murdered children was devastating, and one could see that here was an actress of great power; the staging of the phantoms on the moors that haunt Macbeth was remarkable—glowing forms appearing from under the stage as if from the cauldron itself.

  In spite of my shortcomings, I did, at least, come up with one or two bits of “business” I can claim as my own. At the beginning of the play, when the witches first encounter Macbeth, they prophesy he will become Thane of Cawdor, adding, “Thou shalt be King hereafter.” I decided to react by laughing uproariously for the longest time as if it were the funniest joke I’d ever been told until it struck me like a thunderbolt that they were telling me everything I wanted to hear. At that point I choked on my laughter and, quite shaken, sat on the ground beside Banquo (played by William Hutt) as together we shared several moments of stunned silence. It worked well and was most effective. The second innovation was more of a trick than a true expression. Always anxious to show off my athleticism, I picked the famous banquet scene as the moment to surprise the audience. Upon seeing the ghost of Banquo suddenly appear seated opposite me, I hurled myself at him across the table headfirst, clearing it and landing smack on the empty chair, then began strangling it in impotent rage as I brought it crashing to the ground. This didn’t always work and I frequently grazed my groin rather badly in the process—not a stunt to be recommended to anyone who might have ambitions as a sought-after stud. Instead of using the traditional broadswords for the scuffle at the play’s end, a rather original knife fight was choreographed by Paddy Crean, an expert fencing master from England, very pukka sahib indeed. Paddy, who had stepped right out of a Rudyard Kipling tale, had staged many a celebrated duel and had once or twice doubled for Errol Flynn in his Hollywood epics. True to the bad-luck theory associated with the play, I consistently cut myself in the fight, almost every other night.

  The most unorthodox thing that occurred during all this was that Kate and I were to go down in history as the first actors in North America to appear on satellite. Satellite was a new phenomenon then and we were asked to play a short scene from Macbeth, which would follow a speech by President Kennedy—what a non sequitur! We shot it from the Stratford stage on our day off and had to wait several hours for the beam to appear. We got so nervous waiting that we hit the vodka big time and the world watched through a mercifully grainy picture the two alcoholics, Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, teetering unsteadily around their living room.

  Our brazen production received vastly mixed reactions from public and press alike. They either hated it or defended it—both vehemently. But Macbeth as a work is so strong it makes phantoms of its actors and somehow plays itself. And the controversy famously associated with it always manages to put asses in the seats and we sold out for the entire season.

  My real-life better half finally arrived from London looking very much herself again. Her hair had grown back completely and there was no longer any trace of swelling in her face—but she was far too thin and needed serious fattening up. We set up shop in a ground-floor apartment on a quiet street shaded by huge trees. Away from the bustle of sixties London, I was afraid Trish would be bored out of her wits, but she made friends easily and the company would come to like her enormously. One day, we both stumbled upon a fully grown young crow who had presumably fallen out of a tree. He had been obviously shunned by his family and was limping quite badly. As if guided by some unseen force, we took him into the house, fed him, his health improved and he lived happily with us for the rest of the summer. We called him, quite fittingly, Caw-dor. Cawdor never stepped talking—we were nearly driven mad. He would perch on the top of the bedroom door and imitate our entire conversation in his scratchy, gravelly fashion. (“The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.”) We could hardly get a word in. Whenever we came in from being away, he would fly down from his perch and berate us in a lengthy salvo of vitriolic rebuke. Of course there was a lot of ornithological pooper-scooping to be done, but we managed and really became most attached to the silly thing.

  At parties after the performance we would give him a little whiskey in a cup which we placed on the floor. He would eagerly lap it up, being careful to spread his wings and cover the cup with them so no one could see him drinking. Obviously, the bird was a victim of Ontario’s puritanical liquor laws. After imbibing thus, Cawdor would stagger about a little, looking quite skwiffy with a stupid vacant expression on his face. He loved his hootch, of that there was no doubt, so we nicknamed him the Secret Drinker. Shakespeare consistently refers to ravens and crows throughout the play and Cawdor’s presence among us seemed uncannily if appropriately timed—almost sinister in its implications. I was convinced it was Dame Olwyn in disguise. As all the horrific action in Macbeth takes place after dark, so did Cawdor favour the night. He came alive, a true night-bird down to his last ruffled feathers. After all, he was just following the text:

  … and the crow

  Makes wing to the rooky wood:

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse

  Whilst night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

  THE ELEMENTS now began to behave themselves. The mists of Scotland lifted, the sun came out, the champagne corks popped, I glued on my oversized false nose and Edmond Rostand’s inspired creation, Hercule Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, became, over the next several years, my other self.

  At first I thought the nineteenth-century classic would seem to a sixties audience old-fashioned, flowery, overly romantic. It had had no major revival since José Ferrer’s well-known rendition in which I had played Christian, on television, and that was back in the early fifties. Now, things were different; times had changed. I had convinced myself it wouldn’t work. How wrong I was! Soon Rostand’s impeccably constructed, ageless opera buffo was sweeping us along at a high voltage. Michael Langham’s production glittered with wit and style—real cannons fired away at the Battle of Arras, punctuating the melodrama, and the pathos of the last sce
ne, with autumn leaves falling all around the dying Cyrano, wrenched everyone’s heart and brought the crowds to their feet.

  English versions of the play, no matter how good they may be, can never approach the natural beauty of the original French. Nonetheless, Langham had cleverly mixed a direct translation with the famous Brian Hooker adaptation, which garnished the enterprise with a much more genuine Gallic flavour. This was also enhanced by Louis Applebaum’s background score with special songs written for les Cadets de Gas-coyne, sung in French by Quebec actors from the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. At the end, when Cyrano addresses the heavens: “I take one thing away with me tonight,” instead of Hooker’s “white plume” Michael restored Rostand’s original word “panache”:

  CYRANO: …et ce soir, quand j’entrerai chez Dieu, Mon salut bailaiera largement le seuil bleu, Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache, J’emporte malgré vous, et c’est …

  ROXANE: C’est? …

  CYRANO: Mon panache!

  The very words “chez Dieu” are untranslatable. One can only say “before God” or “in God’s house” or “with God.” None comes anywhere near the closeness and holy intimacy the French words suggest. It was fascinating, too, while researching to read Rostand’s stinging reply to the Académie Française after the first Paris performance. They had challenged him as a fellow member to explain his meaning of the word “panache.” We know it to suggest flair, style and a carefree nonchalance in the face of adversity, but Rostand’s explanation, too long to print here, is a masterpiece of verbal gymnastics.

  Cyrano of the huge nose and the grand soul is perhaps one of the starriest, most spectacular characters in all romantic drama and one must take full advantage if given the chance. Though I’d admired José’s performance very much and at such close quarters, I also learned from him what not to do should I ever attempt the role. He was so stunning in the comic scenes but towards the end, far too sentimental. Someone said quite accurately that he cried so much at his own death there were no tears left for anyone else. I came to learn from Michael Langham that Cyrano dies ecstatic and that is what is so infinitely moving. After all, Rostand’s stage direction, before the last words “mon panache” is quite simply—il dit en souriant.