In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  Frank had called my good friend Tita Wilson, who was acting as my secretary, and she, in turn, called Elaine who was busy filming over at the BBC. For days, I lay there on the drip, drugged out of my skull, while they took innumerable tests, never once coming up with any kind of diagnosis. The London Clinic in those days was mostly known as a rich man’s hospital and never taken very seriously. Its nursing staff left a lot to be desired. It was also vastly expensive, and the rules were generally rather lax when they shouldn’t have been—there were a lot of wealthy Arabs and their extended families and entourages partying till all hours in their private “suites.” However, for some reason, probably because I didn’t tip anyone, I was allowed hardly a visitor and Elaine, who had been trying to see me for days, was denied entry as she was not “next of kin.” My only real next of kin in London was my ex-wife Trish and had she been allowed in, we both might have had an instant relapse. Stoned as I was most of the time, I was never too aware of the goings-on around me, but one morning as the drugs momentarily waned, I noticed that my intravenous bag had fallen off its perch and was on the floor. I groped for my buzzer, pushed it and a nurse I had not seen before came into the room. (“New,” I thought to myself. “Just off the boat, no doubt.”) I looked again and to my horror she was scooping up the escaped liquid off the floor and back into the bag. She was just about to hang it on its hook when I realized I wasn’t the only witness to this act of second-degree murder. For as luck would have it, at that very moment the head nurse was standing in the doorway. “What do you think you’re doing?!” she demanded of the culprit. Incredibly, the girl began to defend herself, but the head nurse in clarion tones cut her off with a single command—“Out and don’t come back!”—and the assassin scurried from the room blubbing audibly as she ran. Of course, the bag was immediately replaced and I was allowed to resume my trip into the depths of an abyss whose bottom I seemed destined to reach.

  One day, from deep in my never-never land, I thought I saw a vision I knew and loved. It was Elaine wrapped in a sort of haze looking down at me. She was smiling and so, I gather, was I. Her voice, though it came from somewhere miles away and sounded as if it were under water, was the most reassuring sound I could have prayed for. I’d just managed to be able to hear her mumble the words “I’ll be back.” Whatever she’d done, it had worked! For the next day, I was awakened abruptly to find my bed surrounded by several interns and doctors, all in their whites, standing quite formally and reverently, obviously waiting for something very important to happen. Then a distinguished-looking man with graying hair and a deep tan wearing a suit came into the room. The doctors practically genuflected. “Good morning, Sir Ronald,” they all intoned together like a group of schoolboys addressing their headmaster. Sir Ronald spoke softly in a deep calming voice full of authority, “Get those things out of him at once. He doesn’t need any of that rubbish.” He was referring, I gathered, to all my tubes and tentacles. He leaned over me and with great charm said, “Hello, I’m Ronald Gibson. You’re going to be fine, don’t worry. You’re coming to my hospital. See you there.” And he walked briskly from the room.

  Everything now happened so fast it made me even dizzier than I’d already been on drugs. Tubes were ripped from my arms and hands—they lifted me out of my bed—threw me onto a wheelchair—down the lift, into an ambulance—I was driven through London at ninety miles an hour—then up the ramp and through the back door of the Brompton Hospital—up another lift—wheeled into an operating room, where someone strapped me onto a table. Two men with two oversized hypodermic needles the right dimensions for a horse, advanced towards me and without explanation rammed both of them deep into my chest. I couldn’t believe my eyes—they were actually drawing gallons of white liquid from my lungs. That done, they rolled me over and performed the same horrendous stabbing act through my back. The second the needles came out I was wheeled into intensive care, lifted onto a bed which was immediately cordoned off by screens. I was just catching my breath when a nice young man in white leaned through the screens and said, “I’m Sir Ronald’s deputy. He is at the moment in the Canary Islands on holiday. He will be back in a day or two. He asked me to look in on you. You’ve had an attack of pericarditis, which means a great quantity of fluid had collected in your chest. The pain you felt was the pressure of that fluid against your lungs and heart. You’re not out of the woods yet, but you’re in good hands and everything will be fine. Rest well tonight.” Rest? Was he serious?

  That night I didn’t sleep a wink. I noticed in the dim light that there were other patients in the room, also behind screens, obviously all on the critical list. I also noticed what was keeping me awake—the incessant pounding of a machine at the far end of the room. The noise was tumultuous but no one else seemed in the least perturbed by it. I rang a buzzer and a young nurse told me it was three in the morning, that she could do nothing and I’d have to speak to the head nurse. I must have been maddened by sedatives because I started screaming for attention. The matron was there in a second. She glided in soundlessly, an impressive figure in crisp starch with a Polish accent. “Meestah Plummah,” she began in a silky tone of mock servility; “Vat can I do for you? Vy are you so upset?” “Please turn off that hideous damn machine in the corner—it’s driving me bloody well crazy. I can’t get a moment’s sleep!!” She fairly purred, “Of course, Meestah Plummah, I vill be glad to do zat eff you veesh. But unfortunately ze old lady who is connected to it vill die.” As I buried my head in shame amongst the pillows, I saw her give me a wicked smile as she just as silently glided away.

  I was allowed to see Elaine and Tita in the morning. Elaine told me she had laid the law down with Dr. Janvrin. “I told him it was quite clear you were gradually disappearing and that he was to get you out of that ghastly place into a proper hospital or else.” Tita joined in, “You are now in one of the major heart and lung hospitals in Europe.” All this made me feel considerably stronger but not quite strong enough to blow them kisses of gratitude, so I pursed my lips in an exhausted effort as they were whisked out.

  The two or three days that followed in intensive care were most humbling indeed. I quickly learned to worship those nurses who worked so tirelessly and such long hours. They were a different breed altogether from the everyday nurse one is accustomed to. These girls were on a mission—this was the final room before the great unknown and they, the soldiers who barred the gates. In this room life and death were just a breath away from each other. Here were the true angels of mercy and grossly underpaid angels at that. I watched one nurse every few hours shout through a tube into the ear of an old lady who appeared to be in a permanent coma—trying so hard to make some contact with her, to get her to react in some way, “Hello darlin’,” she would shout. “It’s a beautiful day outside today. Can you hear me? Let me tell you about it. Can you hear me?” And she would go on having these long one-way conversations with this inanimate object in the bed. And always so positive, always so cheery. On my last day in that room I woke up to see an empty space where the bed had been. They’d taken it away in the night. I saw the young nurse who was called Peggy being gently led out by the other nurses—she was crying, her whole body sagged with exhaustion and disappointment. “Oh Peggy’ll be all right,” I was told. “She just needs a little rest, that’s all—she’ll be back. You get very close to your patients here, you know.”

  I left intensive care with a great feeling of admiration and respect for these gallant souls and much chastened by the whole experience. I certainly would never be caught shouting at a life-support machine ever again. I thanked them all profusely as they wheeled me down the corridor and put me in a private room. The moment I was in my bed, a tanned face peeked through the door. “Well,” said Sir Ronald, “we got you just in time.”

  He explained in his smooth urbane manner that full recovery for me would take approximately eight weeks, that he was putting me on prednisone but that I must get off it as soon as I could, that I was to do nothing but r
est and certainly no work as yet. “Get some sun somewhere and take that young lady with you.” He turned to go, then stopped at the door. “Do you smoke?” “I do,” I said. “Quit! This is the perfect opportunity!” And then he was gone. Well, there would be no Chich-ester Festival for me, that was certain. In one way I’d been saved, I would put it all behind me but, ironically, the first visitor to my room was Christopher Fry. He brought me some chocolates and a book or two and told me how sorry he was that I would not be opening as Peer. I suddenly felt rather desolate about the whole thing; it had been a project so very close to my heart—besides, I’d grown exceptionally fond of Christopher. I began to have other visitors sporadically. Tita, who was always so caring and kept me laughing a lot. Peter Coe dropped in once or twice before Gynt rehearsals began, but it was that very special lady Elaine of “Astelot,” “Shallot” and Knightsbridge who with unbelievable regularity would cook me all sorts of extra goodies and smuggle them in as care packages—a veritable Nightingale, only this time in Brompton Square. All my life I’ve had a craving for English jellies, which she also conjured up and brought along for dessert, happily jiggling away in their moulds. She would then read me to sleep every night before curfew—spoiled pampered couch potato that I’d become.

  Occasionally Sir Ronald would look in and deliver another lecture on smoking. “You like food, don’t you? Then no cigarettes! It’ll all taste much better, you’ll see.” A few days before I was to leave the hospital, he came for the last time, wished me luck and told me I’d never need see him anymore. He said his good-byes and at the door he turned once more. “You enjoy sex, don’t you?” “Yes,” I answered sheepishly. “No smoking then! Right?” He shut the door behind him—I never saw him again. Two years later at a friend’s wedding in Gloucestershire, an attractive young lady with a rather county manner came up to me. “Are you Christopher Plummer?” “Yes, I think so,” I said. “I believe you knew my father, Ronald Gibson?” “Yes indeed,” I replied. “What an extraordinary man and what a career! I’ll never forget him. He saved my life. Please give him my regards. Is he well?” “No, he died a few months ago,” she said. “Lung cancer. He was a chain-smoker, you know.”

  WELL, I DID GIVE UP the weed and he was right—my taste buds began to enjoy a renaissance and that first glass of red wine slipping down my spanking new smokeless zone was so potent I nearly passed out. Elaine and I went to see the Peer Gynt opening at Chichester. Roy Dotrice was splendid in my relinquished role, much more physically suited to it than I was and blessed with the right sort of quirkiness which came to him naturally and which I would have had to assume. But the whole evening was strangely unsatisfying. Peter’s and my concept was only half realized (there had evidently been insufficient time to delve further), and I couldn’t help thinking that had I been there with Peter working together to resolve it, it would have made all the difference.

  I took the young lady, as advised, into the sun of our beloved Majorca. We did nothing but lie on the beach at Formentor gazing longingly at another spectacular villa perched on a cliff hundreds of feet above the sea—a most pleasant way to live another hopeless dream. The prednisone which I had started to wean myself off had given me a great deal of bulk so I looked like a junior version of Sly Stallone. It was just as well, for unbeknownst to me I was going to need that extra weight for the next venture which was just around the corner. Tita was waiting for us with some vodka at No. 9 when we got back to London. “Oh, by the by, Laurence Olivier called while you were away. He wants you to play Coriolanus at the National Theatre.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  DIRTY LINEN AT “THE NAT”

  Several years had gone by since I’d seen Olivier as Othello, but the memory of that outrageous and titanic performance was still as vivid in my mind as it always will be. As usual, when playing the supreme roles, his main plan of attack was to overwhelm. That diabolical mountebank Edmund Kean, more than a century before, was reputed to have done the same and had, by some sort of osmosis, passed it down to the next generation of stage giants. All great actors have it in them to overwhelm. They make dead sure that they are at odds with everything that is happening around them; that whatever they do is unexpected and unsettling; that they know the trick of the light in the eye, the delayed entrance, the sudden dazzling vocal speed, the unearthly voice from the past, the instinct for milking poetry, the temper of Zeus, the stillness that silences—and that unexplainable thing called pathos.

  Well Larry Olivier had all these at his command and more—all, that is, except pathos. Oh, he manufactured pathos to the hilt—he acted it expertly, wonderfully. He knew all its ingredients, and yet none of them came naturally to him. To have pathos one must be born with it. Ralph Richardson had it in spades; so had Brando and Chaplin; so, I believe, had Chaliapin and the great Salvini. I was deeply moved by the powerful Czech actor Frederick Valk’s Othello because of his utter simplicity and the pathos he owned down to his fingertips. You couldn’t see the wheels going round because his art transcended technique. But Olivier moved me because of his technique. It was evident throughout, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was transfixed by its massive design. He mesmerized us with his effects, his tricks; he pulled out all the stops and showed us every one of them. In other words, he overwhelmed us into being moved, and though we could see the whole process, it didn’t matter a damn because it was still shamefully exciting. He had quite ruthlessly overwhelmed his Iago as well (which undeniably got him more attention) mostly by placing poor Frank Finlay in the dim shadows so that you never really saw him all at once. At his own admission, Olivier was determined that Iago, who generally wipes the floor with Othello, wasn’t going to get away with it this time.

  As Sir Laurence shaped his Othello, this was no Moor as depicted by Johnston Forbes-Robertson and John Philip Kemble, nor drawn from the ultraromantic illustrations of Eugène Delacroix. This was a real, honest-to-God black Negro, blacker than any Cameroonian—a half-naked warrior with curly matted hair, bare feet and anklets and large, voluptuous lips that folded back in a grimace, a smile or a snarl covering his whole face (he even painted the roof of his mouth and his tongue white, I remember), not to mention the strange wild animal sounds that erupted from deep inside him. In an age when black actors are expected to own the role, he presented a shocking and quite salacious image. Though he moved like a panther, there was intentionally a great deal of Stepin Fetchit in his gait, and his accent was a weird mixture of Arab and Jamaican.

  Sir Laurence as Othello with Maggie Smith as Desdemona

  Yet with all this, there were so many unforgettable moments: his slow undulating shuffle as he made his startling first entrance—naked save for a loincloth, carrying a single red rose (a conceit borrowed from Kean, no doubt)—received audible gasps from the audience. His unexpected humour on reading the line “the Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” as if challenging the Senate to share his laughter at the impossibility of such fanciful things existing. The great resonant power of his voice (he had worked hard to drop it at least two octaves) and that staggering range of his as he shook the theatre with the speech:

  … O, now for ever,

  Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!

  Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars

  That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

  And then the horrid little epileptic fit that follows on the ground (his own invention) at the feet of Iago. Finally, near the play’s end, Olivier is not afraid to milk all the romance from his final speech as he stretches the poetry to infinity:

  … One, whose hand,

  Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away,

  Richer than all his tribe.

  Was it a great performance? Even without the pathos? The answer is yes, I think so. It was not the Moor of Venice; it was closer to John Buchan’s Laputa or Emperor Jones, perhaps, but whatever it was, it was overwhelming—and probably the very last we will see of that timeless, larger-
than-life kind of performing that belonged to an unidentifiable golden age when the actor reigned supreme.

  BACK IN THOSE prosperous days, I was living at the Connaught in London. I was going through my “single period” again—a bachelor between ladies. Having finished a boozy Saturday lunch all alone in the Grill Room with coffee and several Poire Williams and musing on my wasteful life (a rare sixties guilt rush), I suddenly decided to intrude upon Larry in his dressing room after the Othello matinée. Hoping to wear off lunch, I staggered down to the Old Vic on foot—an ambitiously long trek indeed—and arrived miraculously on time. The curtain had just come down. I went to the stage door and was announced. A dresser was busy removing Larry’s black makeup, an ordeal that seemed to take forever. “You weren’t out front today, I hope,” Larry screeched. “Oh myyy Gawd! They booed me, dear! They booed me! They think I’m a fucking racist pig, darling, a racist pig!” When Larry was in an exuberant mood, he would often assume this pseudocamp performance, which was miles over the top. He told a few off-colour jokes and then we fell into silence. His dresser was having the deuce of a time trying to remove the makeup—it wasn’t coming off at all easily. What could this mean? Black Equity’s revenge? Larry looked at me, his eyes becoming slits. I was sure he was thinking, “Is this inebriated jerk ever going to leave?” The cat had completely got my tongue. “Well,” said Larry, “what can I do for you, Kit?” His weary, long-suffering tone implied, “Spit it out, for Chrissakes. I want my dinner.” Whether it was the booze that made me a bit teary or a sudden attack of nerves I’ll never know, but I heard my voice tremble as I blurted out, “I want to come and work here—more than anything—if there’s ever a space?” but I couldn’t find the words to go on. He came over and gave me a big hug which left a lot of black goo all over my Savile Row suit and I was gently ushered out. But he’d remembered—after all these years, he’d remembered! And it was to be Coriolanus! Well, well! Not bad for a start!