In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  AFTER A BRIEF STAY with the Jameses in England, Fuff stayed on to do a BBC television programme, and I ended up in Portugal to appear, incongruously, in a Swedish film in English which takes place in Mexico. I was at once fascinated by Portugal, the beauty of the Algarve, the elegant landscaping of Sintra, the music of fado at night in CasCais, and of course the unique galleon-like architecture of Lisbon, reminding one that this small country once ruled the seas. And then the unexpected splendour of its wines, comparable to the best French, for Portuguese wines generally do not travel well. It was at the old Aviz restaurant in Lisbon, once a hangout for exiled royalty, that I discovered my newfound favourite aperitif—white port—which entices the palate and gently glides down the throat as smooth as silk.

  Annie Orr-Lewis had given me letters of introduction to two old ladies, the Wright sisters, who were well-known characters in Lisbon and knew every inch of the city. Their father was at one time British ambassador to the Chinese court, and the two little girls grew up playing games at the palace with the children of the last empress of China. He then became ambassador to Portugal where they remained for the rest of their lives. They were most kind to me and took me to lunch at Queluz, that most exquisitely unpretentious of royal residences; the kitchens of which had been turned into a restaurant, the center worktable being one single piece of thick travertine about forty feet long where sumptuous dishes were laid out in buffet style. The Misses Wright also took me to the carpet warehouses where only the designers are permitted to enter and began at once negotiating for me. “Choose any design you want. They’ll make them especially for you.” They put me in mind of a couple of Miss Marples joined at the hip, and wherever they made an appearance, doors were flung open. I’ll never forget those two exceptional old biddies with their wonderful stories of a forgotten bygone China; the gorgeous carpets they had bargained for me for next to nothing did arrive as promised in mint condition at our new abode four months later.

  WE HAD RELINQUISHED our little cottage on Bell Island to its master Barron Polan for we had just bought an old carriage house fifteen feet from the water’s edge in Noroton, Connecticut. Built in the late nineteenth century, it was part of an estate that had once belonged to Andrew Carnegie. This solid old building made of stone and wood was where they kept their carriages in one long room and their horses in another. It was quite large and had an upstairs which could easily serve as the living quarters. We began to renovate. The big carriage room over sixty feet long became the downstairs living room with four separate seating areas, and the horse stable next to it, almost the same length, would be the dining room. The big living room had wonderful wide floor planks, which we had bleached and then scattered over with the Portuguese rugs, but the dining room was a challenge. We gutted it completely, took out the horse stalls, opened it up to the sound by installing huge French windows all along the waterfront. What a view—we felt we were on a ship. It was all quite lovely, but it took the better part of two years to get rid of the smell of horseshit.

  The Barn, enjoying the calm before the storm

  Nonetheless, it was a good house in which to entertain. A lot of chums came to stay. Sally and Geoffrey, of course, my brand-new agent, Lou Pitt, who, poor chap, has been stuck with me for all these years as my manager and friend. The beautiful Jill Melford, a very great chum, came for a Christmas weekend and stayed almost two months. She brought her son Alexander and left him behind after she’d gone, with instructions to find a local school where he could glean an American education. Some long weekend! Which prompts the age-old question—do the English, when they colonize, ever know when to leave?! Sniffing around the house after she’d gone, we found several items that Melford had forgotten, including a sculptured head and shoulders of herself when young. A few days later, she sent a sweet note, which ended, “Thank you, darlings, I left my heart behind, but I also left my bust.”

  We lived at the “Barn” for a while longer, with and without the builders, until one day our fates were decided for us. First, we were maced in our beds and robbed (thievery from the water had become the mode); then not too long afterward, a tremendous nor’easter hit the coastline. Waves were huge, the winds almost hurricane force—it went on for two days. When the storm at last abated I decided to go down to the basement and assess the damage. We’d spent a considerable amount transforming it into comfortable quarters complete with shower and sauna, a bar area with stools and couches, and a game room next to this. Outside on the terrace behind a low seawall (our only buffer) we had planted a lovely garden which stretched the whole length of the house. The moment I descended to the basement floor, I was waist high in water. The garden was now inside where the bar had been, and the bar was now outside where the garden had been. I could see at least fifty yards from the shoreline all the bar and bathroom furniture floating farther and farther out to sea. It took just about the length of Melford’s visit to clean everything up. We’d had enough—we were beaten thoroughly! We put the old Barn on the market and sold it in no time for a splendid amount. In fact, I think I’ve earned more in my lifetime from real estate than from showbiz, but I wish I’d waited a little longer, another thirty years, perhaps, because just recently it sold again—this time for ten million dollars.

  What we really needed now was something permanent on the East Coast, near enough to Manhattan to make sense. We needed peace and privacy. And anyway, it was time we settled down. I was fifty and Fuff thirty-six and the game of buying and selling was on its way out. We found what we were looking for near the small inland Connecticut town of Weston, a rambling house of no architectural discipline which had been built around an old barn. It sat in a considerable amount of acreage, at least enough to ensure complete privacy and where no neighbours could be seen. It was also surrounded by a nature preserve, which meant no one could ever build near us. I knew we would have a massive landscape overhaul ahead of us and more building—a caretaker’s house was essential. It was all pretty daunting, yet something was pulling me along, willing me to take it. When I got inside I knew why. My God, it was Raymond Massey’s old house that I had visited so often in the fifties. I called Ray in Beverly Hills. “I think I’ve just bought your house, Pappy!” “No! It’s not possible, Ignatius.” (He’d remembered to call me Ignatius.) “But it’s got the big barn as the living room and the loft is now a minstrel gallery just exactly like yours and it’s got the same address on Honey Hill!” “No, Ignatius, you’ve bought the house right next door.” “Who’s got yours then?” “I sold it years ago to Theodore Bikel.” Will coincidence never cease? Twenty years had passed and I end up not only next to my old mentor’s house but the house that belongs now to the man who created Captain von Trapp on the stage! Can you imagine two von Trapps staring at each other across a picket fence? I can think of nothing worse.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  TWO PLUMS ON BROADWAY

  My friend Peter Coe was on the phone. He was telling me he’d just taken over the much-maligned and neglected American Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, Connecticut, the very place where, at its inception years ago, my Marc Antony had seriously jumpstarted my career. “Please come and do your Henry the Fifth again and then Iago. It’s high time you played that one. I’ve got Jimmy Earl Jones to do Othello and some producers who want to take it to New York!” It didn’t seem like an offer I could refuse and besides I only lived a stone’s throw away. I said yes. But Peter wasn’t finished. “I also want you to play the Chorus as well as Henry—because it has the best verse in the play and I can only hear you speaking it.” Being an overindulgent maniac where verse is concerned and terribly susceptible to flattery, I said yes again!

  What a workout it was! Though in good physical shape and at least slim enough to squeeze into fifteenth-century tights, I was fifty-one after all, and Henry was a mere twenty-six, or so history would have it. Of course age mattered not where the Chorus is concerned as he could be young, old, anything—an ageless creature. I should have stuck to the Chorus onl
y, but like a susceptible idiot, I was tempted by the trumpet-tongued rhetoric those two parts offered. Some moments in the production worked well—the night before the battle where it was sufficiently dark to hide my advancing years and whenever Roy Dotrice was on stage as Fluellen—but the combination of Henry/Chorus not only looked like an absurd ego trip, it was downright ludicrous. How can an actor play the storyteller who spouts nothing but iambic praise for the young King Hal and then come on immediately as the King himself?! I think one reviewer succinctly remarked that I never stopped bumping into myself. And it was John Simon of New York Magazine who mentioned that my eyes, as Henry, staring out at the battlefield were not the eyes of a youth discovering for the first time the hardships of responsibility but the eyes of an aging cynic who undoubtedly had seen it all before.

  Also not particularly easy was sharing the stage with that old warhorse Dotrice. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my head above water, for every scene we had together he quite mercilessly stole from under me. Each night during one or another of my long dissertations, he would sit beside me and slowly peel fresh leeks till the whole auditorium reeked from the stench. Roy made this important but relatively minor role seem as much a star part as Henry’s. I told him that the play should be retitled “Fluellen the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth.” In spite of everything, the run did well, business was good, and I remember with pride Katharine Hepburn coming backstage to compliment me, which made me think I’d perhaps been better than I thought. Well, I said good-bye to Henry and the Chorus—at least my voice had had a superb workout and I was ready to tackle Iago.

  What excitement this creature offers! With what Machiavellian wit and malevolent cruelty does his scheming mind take its revengeful course. After many an attempt at writing stage villains with breathtaking mastery, Shakespeare finally arrived at his greatest creation of all in that regard. Iago stands head and shoulders above all the other bad guys of literature—a truly major study of the dark embodiment of evil. The play is about jealousy. Iago, the most jealous of them all, preys upon Othello, who becomes jealous first of Desdemona, then of Cassio, until the whole piece is thoroughly infected by jealousy as if by a plague. Iago, like all major classic roles, gives the actor performing it a freedom of interpretation; it generously offers him many options. The most popular current view, it seems, is that he is a rough sergeant major of lower class, an ordinary man who becomes extraordinary when driven by his own deviltry, fiendishly jealous of the man he serves, a black man in a white man’s world—and a very powerful one at that.

  The Ernest Jones theory (referred to earlier) that he is a latent homosexual who lusts after Othello, partly to get closer to the seat of power that he may overthrow it the more swiftly, is also valid. However one may disagree, these two interpretations are not to be ignored. But I contend that though he is ranked several notches below the Moor, he is not in the least servant class but a seneschal of middle class who has bargained and blackmailed his way into Venetian aristocracy, cleating his way up the social ladder. He feels robbed of the post he’s convinced he should have held. That a black man should be favoured above him is a true injustice and something he finds abhorrent beyond tolerance, archracist that he is. His mind is quicker than anyone else’s in the play; he is sophisticated, cynical, well versed in the politics of Venice and how to play their game. He feels entitled: this is certainly not his first foray in the art of manipulation, but it is the very last chance he has in his quest for power.

  I suppose my view is essentially a nineteenth-century one born from the idea that actors of that time, particularly star actors, looked upon the role as being equal in importance to Othello and they would be right—it is much lengthier and one of the longest roles in Shakespeare. This would not be applicable, perhaps, to the man who played opposite the great Salvini or the unfortunate fellow who had to share the stage with Kean, but it certainly applies to the end of the nineteenth century, when the American star Edwin Booth played Iago to Sir Henry Irving’s Othello—they actually alternated roles. Reports of the time have it that Booth’s villain did not die offstage as the author indicated. He came back in the end, straddled the body of the dead Moor and, shaking his fists at heaven, laughed a ghastly triumphant laugh as the curtain descended. How Irving, whose production it was, allowed this to happen boggles the mind. I wasn’t quite as bold as Mr. Booth, but as I lay mortally wounded on the ground after the Moor’s demise (James having ripped my testicles apart with his sword), I struggled to get up in vain and laughed a bitter laugh of both loss and victory. James Earl did not take to this at all, and, looking back, I don’t in the least blame him. He claimed I was altering the author’s intentions and of course in part he was right. He was also finding difficulty in comprehending why I was getting so many laughs throughout the evening. He had already played the Moor more than once, before our production, and no Iago of his apparently had as much as forced a smile from the audience. So he became convinced that the laughter was of a mocking nature and directed at Othello’s expense. But here he was wrong. The role of Iago is immensely witty (the opening scene alone offers eight legitimate laughs), all the more reason to charm the spectators so that when his evil side shows itself, it is so much more terrifying. Some of the critics, however, found my performance at Stratford overly melodramatic and said so. I will admit I was perhaps enjoying myself too much in the old cloak-and-dagger manner.

  Othello poster

  James Earl and Peter Coe did not exactly hit it off—they were constantly at loggerheads conceptually. One of them had to bend, and it was not going to be Peter. One night, after one of the Henry performances, a dark-haired lady came backstage to see me. My dresser, an overly protective young lass called Melinda Howard, full of spiky charm, shut the door in her face. “That was a bit rough, Howard,” I said. “I think I should at least see her. She may be the producer they were talking about.” Melinda gave me a look that read, “Okay, suckass,” and grudgingly let her in. “Hello, I’m Fran Weissler. My husband, Barry, and I want very much to present Othello in New York. Both you and James have got to be seen in this play.” Her voice was soft and intimate. She was most good-natured and didn’t seem in the least perturbed by the noise Melinda was making as she cleaned the makeup table. She told me in soothing tones how much she loved Shakespeare (she made it sound as if she’d known him intimately) and how she and Barry had only done children’s theatre up to that point and had never ventured forth into the big professional arena. She was cozy, comfortable to be with, and I fed off her enthusiasm. I listened to her story and politely suggested she call my agent. She had barely got up to leave when Melinda signaled that the audience was over by announcing loudly, “Here’s your first of the evening,” as she plunked down on the table an enormous snifter of red wine. Eventually, all was signed and sealed, and the Weisslers were to present us in New York.

  Quarrels between Peter and James had now come to a crunch and Peter informed the Weisslers he was out. Zoe Caldwell was brought in and she took over like a whirlwind, helping everyone with their punctuation and breathing, essential to performing Shakespeare. She got on with James quite well and soon everything settled down and we were off on the road. The first stop was, incredibly, the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach and we opened in front of that bejewelled gathering, notorious for their minimum attention spans—even for simple fare, let alone Shakespeare. When Othello kissed Desdemona, an African black kissing an English rose, there was an audible intake of breath that sounded like a tidal wave receding. I had played the Poinciana once before and knew it was hard enough to keep them in their seats for the first act. But any second act, God help it, was a rude inconvenience, which cut straight into their dinner plans. Unbelievably, the magic of that strange language called Elizabethan somehow hypnotized or solipsized them sufficiently to keep most of them there to the end. The manager came running back foaming at the mouth and spluttering, “It’s a hit! It’s a hit! Only fourteen walkouts after the first act!”r />
  The tour shuffled along back through the east. Zoe was very firm and worked us to the bone. It was in Baltimore that my rapier flew out of my sweaty hand during the duel with Cassio and embedded itself in the back of a front row seat just missing a poor woman’s eye by a hair. I leaped off the stage, retrieved the sword and quickly whispered in her ear, “Are you all right?” “Yes, thank you, dear, I’m fine.” She was smiling. I think she rather enjoyed being part of the action. It was in Boston on a cold winter’s day in a barely heated suite at the Fairmont Copley Plaza that Natalie “Will we ever?” Wood called me. She was inviting me to play the Prince in Anastasia at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre in which she was to play the title role. I had to tell her I wasn’t free. Darling loyal Nat—always remembering friends. She and R.J. (Wagner) were together again. I missed their parties in Hollywood—there were always so many interesting relics present. For a young lady, it was most unusual to favour as she did the Old Guard.

  It was not many weeks later when we hit Chicago that Roddy McDowall called me to say there was to be no Anastasia. Not only that—there was to be no Natalie, not anymore. She had somehow fallen from her yacht into the sea off Catalina Island. The roar of the motors prevented R.J. from hearing her screams and she perished. The little maenad who couldn’t swim had given herself back to the waters she feared and hated so much. How ironic that they should claim her in the end. The world that loved her and had watched her grow up into the beauteous dark-haired creature who burned up celluloid with her eyes would mourn her forever. And so would I. The West Coast has never quite been the same for me without her there. Anyone who ever met her, as Orson Welles once said, was a little in love with Natalie.