In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  Jason never failed to bring two lives onto the stage with him—his character’s and his own. If he’d been telling me a story offstage and had not completed it because we both were to make our entrances, he’d finish it on. He did this by whispering out of the audience’s earshot, interweaving it around the actual lines of the play. And I would do the same. In the middle of a scene we would plan our after-show pub crawls, in between the lines, sotto voce, without destroying the rhythm of the dialogue. It was a dangerous and daring exercise, but it certainly strengthened our control. When a golden passage came along, however, calling for passion and the storm took him, away he would fly, leaving me behind on the ground, openmouthed till he decided to come back down to earth and join me once again. More than anything, Jason truly loved the fireworks of the theatre—it was his lifeline.

  Our paths had not crossed for the longest time. A near fatal car accident years before had shattered his whole frame, particularly his face, which suffered multiple fractures of so serious a nature that his entire jaw had to be reconstructed. It took an endless amount of time and patience to endure the various stages of surgery, the constant pain and spitting out of teeth. He and Betty Bacall had divorced and the lady he was courting at the time was Lois O’Connor whose administering strength and devotion helped save his life. It was not surprising then that soon after, a grateful and loving Jason made her his wife. The accident and her tender nursing combined were responsible for his finally slowing down. He would soon join Alcoholics Anonymous and dutifully mend his ways, even able to perform again on screen, winning two Academy Awards—one for his Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, and the other for his Dashiell Hammett in Julia, a film about Lillian Hellman. With a vengeance, he went back to the theatre: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this time as the father; Grandpa in You Can’t Take It with You; and a superb Moon for the Misbegotten opposite Colleen Dewhurst. The good news was that in spite of his tortuous recovery, his huge personality had remained unaltered. He had lost none of his spark nor his bubbling good humour. And now here we were, with so much water under so many bridges later, about to join forces once more.

  Though I had only read No Man’s Land and had never seen it, it was by far my favourite work of Harold Pinter—that master of the unfinished thought. It is one of the least obscure of his plays and offers two marvellous star roles for actors. It is a study in painful nostalgia, the story of two aging eccentrics, Hirst, an old Tory establishment figure (Robards) and a failed poet and scholar named Spooner (me), whose lives are fading away and who have absolutely nothing in common except loneliness. As a play it is both cleverly funny and wistfully touching. It all takes place in the living room of Hirst’s suburban house where he never stops pouring drinks throughout as the two old souses relive their pasts, neither really listening to what the other is saying.

  Harold himself was present at several of the early rehearsals. It was wonderful having him there, his bitter tongue highly amusing, but I’m not sure that he proved much help. There were those unexplained mysterious Pinter pauses throughout the play and some murky dialogue that to this day still passeth all understanding. When I asked Harold what he’d meant by a certain non sequiturial utterance, he fell silent for so long—at least twenty Pinter pauses strung together as one—then replied, “I haven’t the foggiest.” Now, he said and did everything in deadpan, hardly ever smiled, so he could easily have been pulling my leg. But you never know with Harold and I still suspect that he was occasionally guilty of creating effects for the sake of effect only and that they just luckily happened to fall into place and miraculously worked in context.

  Jason and me

  Jason’s and my roles had been originally played by Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, but as I had not seen that production there was thankfully little chance of being influenced by those two great artists. Jason put on an old tweed sports coat and Jane Greenwood, the designer, made me a frayed grey suit, a little short in the trouser legs complemented by a pair of filthy sneakers, and we played it for sixteen weeks at the Roundabout to the strangest variety of audiences I can ever recall. There was Deaf Night, Gay Night, Lesbian Night, First-date Night, any sort of combination that would hopefully increase attendance. Then, of course, there was the usual average American audience for whom Pinter was total anathema. Nevertheless, Jason and I had enormous fun soldiering on aided and abetted by David Jones—a most astute and excellent director, very much a Pinter specialist, and as the audience numbers grew, we found ourselves enjoying quite a success.

  Todd Haimes, the young producer/impresario, had only recently begun to turn the Roundabout into a major artistic force in the city. With none of the accompanying ballyhoo that usually tries to propel such a new project, Todd simply went quietly and modestly about his business presenting plays of quality, new and old, with the odd musical thrown in for good measure. He also was able, because of the limited runs, to cast them with top-grade artists. Located as it was on Seventh Avenue between Forty-fourth and Forty-third Streets, right in the heart of “your money or your life” commercialdom, it reminded me of a brave little fortress of culture battling to defend itself against the surrounding honky-tonk of Times Square. If it worked there, it could work anywhere.

  Jason and I admired Todd tremendously, both for his toughness under fire and his utter unpretentiousness. He asked us if we would consider joining his board of directors and we accepted at once. Liam Neeson and his now wife, Natasha Richardson, had just scored a huge success for the Roundabout in O’Neill’s Anna Christie and they came onto the board as well. Todd was swiftly commandeering a substantial fighting force to back him up. There was another space for a stage in the existing building and a generous lady patroness named Laura Pels had given an enormous sum towards its construction. In the hopes of obtaining sponsorship from various corporations, I began making fund-raising speeches. I even put on a one-man show I had devised to promote world literacy, and that also raised some much-needed cash. But the Roundabout continued to face untold problems including a restless landlord who wanted to close the theatre down, evict us all and sell the place.

  Today, of course, Todd’s insuperable ambitions have been more than realized. He can boast the beautifully restored Selwyn Theatre on West Forty-second Street as a prized possession, as well as Studio 54 and the completed Laura Pels Theatre. If the quality of his material and the high standard of performance is maintained, this prolific conclave of his could very well be the closest thing to a national theatre the United States has yet seen. But those exciting early days when the promise and the dream were about to come together are rich in my memory, and though I was never to act with Jason again, his last journey to Valhalla slowly approaching, the joy and comfort of playing No Man’s Land with my old friend made that year of 1994 one of the happiest of my life.

  AS I GROW GRAYER, everything—moments, incidents, friendships that have touched me and that I have carelessly brushed aside or taken too lightly—now begin to close in and narrow themselves down to the essentials. Not content any longer to let me get away with anything, they single out the most important things to which I must give my attention and the people around me that matter the most. My neglected daughter, for instance, whom I hardly knew except through her work, has become more of a friend now and I think we feel much closer than we have in the past. She has arrived at middle age, her most original personality intact—that of an immensely talented, strangely spiritual recluse. There is nothing in her eccentricities that is calculated or affected in any way; they are as natural, spontaneous and real as life is real. Unfortunately, they render her quite vulnerable and unprotected. How many of her romances has she subsidized? How many waifs and strays among her male lovers has she cared for so tenderly only to have them fly away without a nod of thanks once their wings have found their strength? The passionate, almost frenetic energy she burns onstage is the same energy she burns in life. Why she never seems to tire is inconceivable to me. Having had not much help from her
parents, she long ago decided to be her own master, so she made herself a little world—a world that is not as comforting nor as gentle as it could be, perhaps, but one she has come to regard as the safest escape hatch she knows.

  Amanda and Diane Lane, the dangerous duo

  The free spirit and her father

  It is no exaggeration to say that her career has been unique—varied, temperamental, inconsistent, brilliant, but always unique. On and Off Broadway, in England, Canada, even Yugoslavia, her theatre work has embraced the writings of Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepherd, Anouilh and a host of important moderns. Her film career began when she, aged twenty, and Diane Lane, aged fourteen, starred as two young desperados who lassoed a wild west town as well as the public in La-mont Johnson’s Cattle Annie and Little Britches. She bounded onto the screen and made herself felt in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. She showed a much different side as Robin Williams’s girl in Terry Gilliam’s Fisher King, ditto in Needful Things with Max von Sydow and Ed Harris and was mostly responsible for the wacky insanity of So I Married an Axe Murderer, not to mention the tons of smaller independent films in which she has shown her uncanny versatility—one called Butterfly Kiss which could hardly have been given a normal release (only in England was it shown), the subject being so violent and brutal.

  She spends most of the picture stark naked as a mad serial killer who in graphic detail seduces her victims, then kills them for the sake of the one person she loves on earth. And all this, before our very eyes. If it wasn’t so extraordinarily well acted and improvised, it would be classed as hard-core horror porn. She slipped me a tape and I watched it in a hotel room in Toronto. I just sat there dumbfounded. It was made in Liverpool with an all-Liverpool cast except for her. No one would have guessed she wasn’t native born, her adenoidal accent was so perfect, so accurate. But I couldn’t believe my eyes—it was like watching a little demon creating havoc wherever she chose with no one to stop her. Yet the motivating pain behind all this she made so moving and so true. I was deeply affected by this horrific movie and I felt suddenly terribly old-fashioned, conventional and cautious. I longed to have the same sort of freedom and daring that came so naturally to her. It upset me, not as a father but as an artist, and I couldn’t help admiring her and her fearless courage more than ever.

  AS T. S. ELIOT MEASURES HIS LIFE with coffee spoons, so I measure mine by the plays I’ve been in. I’m too vague to measure it any other way. So when someone asks, “When was it that they shaved your pubic hairs?” I think for a moment, then say, “Uh—wait a minute. Uh, yeah, that would be Henry V—1956—removal of kidney stone!” Then does everything else fall into place, more or less. The eighties ended with Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favourite authors, as a one-man docudrama for public television. A Professor Fleming at Princeton University had collected the material and written it all down. However, it needed orchestrating, so its director, Peter Medak, my Hungarian friend, and I helped by arranging the playing order. I carefully studied Nabokov’s voice and accents and got them down pretty well—that extraordinary mélange of Mittel-European wood-notes wild. Though in my sixties, I still needed to apply prosthetics to my jowls, smooth my hair down, give him a balding appearance and put some padding behind the shoulders to resemble his slight stoop. We filmed it all at Cornell University in Ithaca where he had taught European literature and where, as a world-renowned lepidopterist, he kept his endless collection of butterfly specimens permanently pinned inside large glass cases in the library. “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

  There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,

  a semi-pavonian creature.

  Poke at it curiously

  with your green umbrella,

  ˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙

  And there you stand, not yet believing

  your wordless woe.

  About that blue somnolent animal

  whom will you tell, whom?

  Where is the world and the labeled roses,

  the museum and the stuffed birds?

  And you look and look through your tears

  at those unnamable wings.

  —V.N.

  We chose Nabokov’s lecture on Kafka and his Metamorphosis as the programme’s content, using actual Cornell students to fill the lecture hall. It turned out quite well, enough to be proud of, and, with all due deference to the great Vladimir, I had much joy invading his privacy. Forgive me, Master.

  MOST OF THE NINETIES were spent globe-hopping again—some-times with Fuff, sometimes without—it depended on how much patient dog sitting was required. There were several movies and television programmes made in England, allowing us to catch up with our friends there—now narrowed down to a precious few: Sally James, Jean Headley, the “Jockstrap” Carters, their son Jamie, Ruth and Ismond Rosen (the great psychoanalyst and sculptor), the Geires, Phil and Faith, and of course Jill Melford-Lyon and her precocious offspring, Alexander. Sally, Fuff and I took off for postperestroika Russia to the newly restored St. Petersburg, perhaps the most fantastic fairy-tale city in the world. The film was yet another take on the life of Catherine the Great with Vanessa Redgrave and the beautiful Julia Ormond. We shot it in and around most of the Romanov palaces (how they got permission beats me) which had been face-lifted by the Russian government to resemble some of their former glory. The one we used most was the immense summer palace Tsarskoe Selo, all in blue and gold and as big as a town, to which as late as 1916 Nicholas and Alexandra would travel to spend a few weeks, accompanied by two thousand five hundred servants. The whole experience was a feast for the eyes. Everything around us outdazzled the film we were making so completely that I don’t remember what on earth it was all about.

  Sally, Fuff and I, after all that splendour, would return to our meager lodgings in a very Spartan hotel and eat caviar, which we bought at Intourist with American dollars, and tinned pork and beans—this was our nightly diet. Prince George Golitzin, whose daughter Katya was dialogue coach for the Russian actors, had just been granted permission to return to Mother Russia and claim his estates. To earn some necessary cash, he had organized a series of expeditions to tour St. Petersburg privately with a select few and himself as guide. We all put our names down with the hope of revisiting the magical city in this special manner when sadly Golitzin fell ill and died and there was an end.

  After depositing Sally in London, we made for New York and Malcolm X, with Denzel Washington. Spike Lee, the writer/director, was a tonic to work with and proved most loyal to me. As an actor, and a terrific one at that, he spoke our language and wasted no time on bullshit. In fact, he was such a cool customer and so easy to be with I felt, at first meeting, I’d known him all my life.

  As Colonel Chang, my favorite Klingon

  Then, leaving Fuff with the dogs, I was off to California and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, bringing me together after so many years with Bill Shatner, my onetime coplayer back in Montreal during the forties. As directed and written by Nicholas Meyer, this was, I think, the most fun to watch of all the Star Trek movies, tongue-in-cheek from start to finish. I played my first and only Klingon ever, General Chang. I refused to wear all the phony makeup, the oversized brow and the long mane of hair, so after much argument with the traditionalist producers, gaining Nick’s support by the moment, I won. That masterful makeup artist, the late Richard Snell, created a baldpate with the smallest pigtail in the back and a patch over one eye with a nail driven through it. I was the most soignée Klingon yet and closely resembled a Mongolian Moshe Dayan. They sent someone from Washington, D.C., to instruct us on the Klingon dialogue—why am I not surprised that Klingon is an actual registered language there? However, I insisted on grunting as little as possible and instead leaned on Shakespearean quotes since Chang never stopped spouting from the Bard: “Let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of Kings” or “Let slip the dogs of war” or dying in midphrase “To be or not—.” The fil
m’s funniest line as spoken by David Warner, “You haven’t heard anything till you’ve heard Shakespeare in the original Klingon!”

  Then a return trip to New York for Mike Nichols’s Wolf, with a spectacularly effective Jack Nicholson whose charm could melt an iceberg in one moment but in the next could exit Planet Earth swifter than an arrow from the Tartar’s bow. He has my undying respect as a riveting screen presence almost unmatched and I would like to have been a friend, but his gregariousness was a particularly private one and he clearly preferred to keep “Narnia” as his permanent address. In Wolf, I played the gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer’s wealthy father and in one scene was required to lose my temper and slap her in the face. Gazing into those deep limpid eyes of hers, I was so hypnotized, my expertise at faking a slap utterly deserted me and I let her have it with full barrels—one of the worst days of my life.

  After a couple of trips to Rome to shoot some diabolical sci-fi flick whose name thankfully escapes me, it was back to California for 12 Monkeys, a Terry Gilliam film starring the excellent Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. I was Brad’s dad. God bless Terrence—that multitalented zany old whiz kid who was so nice to my daughter and who keeps asking me to work with him in films that never seem to be made. Don’t stop asking, Terry; I’m available.

  My director in Dolores Claiborne, an intriguing story which starred Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, was the quick-tempered but richly gifted Taylor Hackford, a jazz afficionado and superb filmmaker, whose particular expertise was conjuring atmosphere which gave each story he filmed its own potency and meaning. I got along with Taylor well, but I will always be jealous of him, for he married one of my favourite ladies, a woman for all seasons and certainly one of my most admired actresses, the invincible Helen Mirren.