In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  But the revelation for me was Michael Mann. What a superb filmmaker he is. I had heard of his ability to run a tight ship, to completely take command in the manner of the old European demagogues or C. B. DeMille and his ilk. Whenever he walked on the set—or stalked on, perhaps, is a better description—you could hear a pin drop. There was not a peep out of anyone. He certainly had earned his nickname of “Napoleon.” He also, I quickly learned, had the rather exhausting, sometimes irritating custom of doing untold numbers of takes in every scene. Thirty or thirty-five would not necessarily be an exaggeration. I nudged Al and whispered, “You worked with him before, does he always do this?” Al raised his eyes to heaven. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m afraid so, but hang in there, because it’s all worth it!” Even though he probably chose takes one, two or three as his final preference, there was something different Mann was looking for in each one. He knew exactly what he wanted, but he wanted to see it all at the same moment. I had rarely witnessed such intensity of concentration in a director—Elia Kazan, perhaps, but in a different way.

  I had felt that my character of Wallace was a little too cynical and harsh—a little too on the nose, perhaps a trifle expected. I asked for a scene to be written showing the vulnerable side of Wallace—his bruised Achilles’ heel. After all, he did have a vulnerable side; I’d seen it in a most moving moment in an interview in which he talks about his son’s fatal accident in Greece. He was clearly grief stricken yet determined to avoid any undue sentiment. It showed a side of him that certainly I’d never seen before. I told this to Michael Mann and Eric Roth and asked for a confrontation with Bergman (Al) where Wallace lets loose his feelings and confesses his fears. They both listened patiently and agreed to it. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Just before it was to be released, one of the film’s producers deserted and left the project, ultimately afraid of threats and repercussions from the tobacco industry. He had not followed through with the original courage it took him to promote the film in the first place. Only Michael Mann and Eric Roth were left holding the bag and only they took it all over the globe on a prerelease tour—only they had the guts to stay with the ship. It was a wonderful film, an important film, and I am proud to have been in it. Only recently I bumped into Mike Wallace at some film showing. We talked for several minutes; then he took me aside and, to my great surprise, told me how much he had admired what I had done for his character in the movie. As I had for some time been extremely nervous and wary of his reaction, I cannot describe the extent of my relief. The only resentment I harbour for the handsome Mr. Wallace, damn him, is that in his late eighties, he looks like my son.

  MEANWHILE, POOR FUFF had been lumbered with the ever-increasing responsibility of taking care of our remaining two dogs, who were both slowly nearing their end. When Toadie died, the old golden retriever Rags, her dad, began to go crazy. His heart had broken. He had never stopped loving her, kissing her eyes, cuddling her in sleep, and now she wasn’t there anymore so the night terrors began. He would sleep through the day, but at night he would prowl about the house, howling his lungs out and then would bark furiously at the shutters flanking the French windows as he tried in vain to climb into them. Fully awake through all this, Fuff would stay up with him trying valiantly to lull him to sleep. This sad ritual had been going on for the best part of two years. One day both of us had to travel somewhere together, so Piggie very generously took him in. At the end of three weeks, Rags decided he’d waited long enough for our return, so, rather noisily, I’m told, he gave up the ghost. What a remarkable old dog. He was seventeen, a great age for a goldie, and he must have been, for the most part, the happiest of dogs, for he never stopped singing.

  Briggie followed soon after. She was the first dog we took in and the last to go. Dear staunch bossie Briggie, armed with that astonishing intelligence, had now become infirm. It didn’t seem possible—she was the mother of us all. Briggs suffered from a kind of vertigo that dangerously disturbs the balance and made her wonder constantly if she was standing on a cliff’s edge or on a flat surface. Her appetite had given up as well and she’d begun walking around in circles. On the day she was put down, coward that I am, I couldn’t summon up the courage to go. I knew I couldn’t handle it—that I would collapse completely. But Fuff and Piggie took her. The vet was very gentle with her and as he inserted the needle, he said to Fuff, “Now make her look at you—you’re the last person she’ll see that she loves.” Afterwards, Fuff told me that when Briggie had looked at her, those consoling eyes of hers seemed to say, “Don’t worry—it’s all going to be all right.” She was looking after us right up to the end.

  Without the rest of the pack, we felt silly and more than a little empty as we gazed out the windows at our large rambling grounds, which now seemed quite superfluous. Of course, they are still with us really, for Toadie, Briggie and Rags are all buried together beside the old orchard wall at the top of our hill. The oddest thing was that come the spring after Briggie died, the little dogwood tree she had always sat under for so many years, her favourite tree, sprouted no leaves. There was no life left in it—it too had given up its ghost.

  IT WAS A GODSEND that my next assignment came swiftly and took place in England—at least two thousand miles between us and sad memories of departed friends. I was to play Ralph Nickleby, the bad uncle in a film of Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Nicholas Nickleby, along with a superlative British cast—Juliet Stevenson, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Tom Courtenay, the Aussie Barry Humphries, Edward Fox and two Americans, Nathan Lane and Anne Hathaway. Doug McGrath directed. I had seen his production of Emma for the screen and respected his work highly; he had captured so thoroughly the essence of Jane Austen. I was convinced that McGrath must be a young Irishman from the auld country, more at home with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature than most of his contemporaries. Imagine my surprise when he turned out to be an honest-to-God Texan, complete with Southern drawl.

  Doug McGrath directed us with the same stylish instinct he had demonstrated with Emma. The Dickens novel is impossible to film in its entirety; there are too many extraordinary characters, too many subplots and episodes—truly an embarrassment of glorious riches. Needing to edit it drastically, Doug chose to keep as the clearest and most essential story line the relationship between the two Nicklebys, Nicholas and Ralph. The film was a delight, won several prizes, including a nomination for Best Ensemble. At the National Board of Revue, we all marched up to the podium to accept, and Nathan Lane, our spokesman, quipped, “Personally, I don’t do ensemble. I believe in every man for himself.”

  Briggie under her favourite tree

  While in London, we stayed at the Goring Hotel tucked behind Buckingham Palace. It is a private hotel run by the Goring family, a miniature Connaught, with superb cuisine and half the price. I did my usual damage at Turnbull & Asser (I have had more shirts made for me there than there are days of the year); Fuff hit the Burlington Arcade and Theo (ouch!) Fennell; we put on huge poundage at Mark’s Club, Mossemon’s, Harry’s Bar, the Ivy, and our favourite Knightsbridge restaurant from early courting days—Le Poissonerie de l’Avenue.

  I got to know my new and dynamic London agent, Pippa Markham of Markham & Froggatt (a Dickensian name if ever I heard one), who held court in rickety old office quarters on Windmill, off Charlotte Street, which also couldn’t have been more Dickensian if they’d tried. Pippa and her delightful partner, Stephanie Randall, held the monopoly on the most talented young actors and directors in England, and Pippa, no matter what time of day or night, could be seen bicycling her way through London traffic, trouser clips, helmet and all. She even bicycled to film premieres in full evening dress, with helmet accessories—the terror of the red carpet!

  One day I bumped into Jonathan Miller on Shaftsbury Avenue. We both expressed our desire to work together again—much time had passed since Danton’s Death at the National. “I’d love to do one of the great comedies, such as Volpone, and you more than anyone
know all about those wild Elizabethan romps,” I said, buttering him up as forcefully as I could. “Let me think about it—I’ve thought about it—you’re on,” he promptly responded. I suggested we rehearse and open it at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, then take it to New York. He agreed to that too. But now the London gourmandizing came to a halt; filming was completed on Doug McGrath’s Nickleby, so Fuff and I carried our distended tummies onto British Airways and flew them back home where a message was waiting from a friend, an old friend I hadn’t seen for the longest time.

  “WE’RE GOING TO DO a tour of the east coast in a thing called A Royal Christmas,” said Julie Andrews when I called her back. “You and I will emcee it; Charlotte Church will do the singing. The Royal Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Shumka Ukrainian dance company will do the dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky (who won’t be coming with us) which will be played by London’s Royal Philharmonic under the stylish baton of George Daugherty, who is very funny and very experienced at these things. We will travel in buses (ours will be v. posh indeed). The whole thing will take three weeks—we’ll be home by Christmas and the money ain’t nothing to sneeze at either!” I jumped at it!

  It was great being with Julie again. What a pro that lady is! And what fun! Our bus was decked out with all the latest sound equipment, all the comforts of a first-class hotel—bar, kitchen, beds. Our driver had driven all the major pop icons, a couple of presidents—Clinton being one—as well as Queen Elizabeth II. He carried a sort of honorary sheriff’s badge, which when flashed got us all out of trouble in an instant. Local police in each town practically curtsied to him when we drove by. “No doubt who’s the star of this show,” quipped Julie. With us on our bus were Francine Taylor; Julie’s girl Friday; and her two pals, the hair and makeup team of John and Rick—John who ran London’s famous hair salon, Michaeljohn. They kept all our spirits up to such an extent, we never had time to be serious. The Royal Philharmonic musicians, apart from making a gorgeous sound, proved an absolute hoot with their diabolical practical jokes and wisecracks during the performances, giving us loud raspberries from the bassoon and horn sections. Once when I forgot my lines, the entire violin section prompted me from the pit loud and clear. It worked so well as a double act that we tried keeping it in.

  George Dougherty, the conductor, besides being an excellent musician, was not in the least averse to spontaneous naughtiness and outrageous shenanigans. He gave me such confidence in the singing department, something I’ve always shied away from, that I began to think I actually had a future. Julie could no longer use the middle to high range of her voice due to an abortive attempt to operate on her vocal chords, which had failed miserably. The doctor responsible had also done the identical damage to Teresa Stratas, the famous opera diva and actress whose glorious tones were now forever in jeopardy. Still, Julie bravely carried on, singing most attractively in the lower registers, which gave a torch-song sensuality to each number she performed.

  The tour itself was quite hysterical—we played in huge hockey rinks seating fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people at a time from Columbus to Boston, Long Island to Minneapolis, Washington to Ottawa, Toronto to Syracuse—and though there were no tears when it all came to an end, we’d had a hell of a good time, Julie and I, despite our frozen feet from walking over so much ice.

  I WAS JUST ABOUT to open up my copy of Ben Jonson’s Volpone and start committing it to memory when the telephone rang. It was Jonathan. “I don’t want to do Volpone at all. I’ve looked at it and it’s such an unwieldy bugger of a play with huge gaps when neither Volpone nor Mosca are accounted for. I think it’s a waste of time for both of us. At this stage, you should be doing your Lear before it’s too late—I’ll direct it gladly, if you say yes.” “But I wanted to do a great comedy—my heart was set on it,” I pleaded. “Well, what’s the matter with Lear?” he countered. “It’s one of the funniest plays ever written.” “But I’ve just turned down Peter Hall’s offer to do it. What on earth am I going to say to him?” “Tell Pierre Foyer that you’ve changed your mind, that’s all.” He was unflappable. So I wrote a groveling letter to Peter Hall and took the plunge.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  APRÈS LEAR—WHAT?

  No, it is not Mount Everest! Perhaps the play is but not the role.

  Richard III is much more vocally and physically challenging. Hamlet is monstrously more daunting. Just to capture its great simplicity and its supreme eloquence is an art in itself. But Hamlet and Richard are true “stars”—they drive and carry all before them. The first hour or so of King Lear has a devastating emotional line to it, as the kingdom crumbles: “You think I’ll weep? … I have full cause of weeping, but this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ’ere I’ll weep. O fool! I shall go mad,” and he makes his exit for the heath. Once on the heath, however, the problems begin. After a few of Lear’s rantings against storms and the commencement of his long day’s journey into madness, the author begins to ignore his protagonist by removing him from the play for an unconscionable length of time while he presents us with yet another—the tragedies of Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar. It is only toward the end, way past bedtime, when Lear is finally led back on by Cordelia—he has been absent so long that only the more astute members of the audience remember him at all.

  Of course it is all written in divine fire and the actor who is willing to leap into those flames is fortunate indeed. He will learn the hopelessness of self-pity, the folly of self-importance; he will look in horror through the king’s eyes at what the real world is like and when it’s over, he may be just that much more prepared for his own old age. But Shakespeare was not kind to his “star.” He forbade him to drive his own play. He barricaded his progress—coitus interruptus at its most flagrant. Perhaps when poor old Lear is sitting alone in his dressing room, waiting interminably to reenter, dying for a drink or a fix, anything to help provide the adrenaline that will carry him to the summit—perhaps that is the Everest to which everyone is alluding.

  All this aside, I loved playing Lear’s remarkable first half; I loved the odd heart-searing moment near the conclusion; I loved the impossible celestial beauty of the end itself and I remain defiantly loyal to Jonathan Miller’s interpretation. Like all geniuses—and Jonathan’s membership in that small exclusive club was unanimously approved long ago—whatever he touches, whether one violently disagrees with it or not, he makes as clear as the clearest diamond. For him the bourgeois idea of a cosmos surrounding the play does not exist nor ever did. The idea of an ancient druidlike king with flowing robes and beard resembling a pre-Raphaelite version of God he completely discards; even Blake’s more stark vision of Lear he banishes to the coffee table. The tragedy, as he sees it, may begin with the changing winds of society, the disbanding of divine rights, but it quickly descends to a private family matter—the dysfunctional life of a family whose members are at their wits’ end. The ultimate blame is attached to the father whose fate is to learn just that, and the timeless message that after all the baubles, bangles and beads, after all the titles and vestments of power have been stripped away—man is nothing more than “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The play is tough, violent and ageless. It is more modern than most contemporary plays that have taken its theme in some form as their inspiration. It is just as modern, if not more so, than Long Day’s Journey Into Night and far more universal.

  It is believed that James VI of Scotland, 1st of England, was most probably part of the audience which saw Lear when it was first presented and that he also could have been the personage on whom Shakespeare based his old king. So Jonathan, with the aid of Clare Mitchell’s gorgeous designs, had it performed in the period when Shakespeare wrote the play—in other words, contemporary. He was also right about its being funny. There are heaps of blackly ironical exchanges throughout: Lear: “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” Fool: “All thy other titles thou has given away; that thou wast born with.” Or, Fool: “Can you make no use of not
hing, uncle?” Lear: “Why no, boy, nothing can be made out of nothing.” And after his daughters have refused to accommodate his attending knights, whittling them down from a hundred to five, and Lear has left the room to go out and face the storm, Regan after a long silence motivates her reasoning by simply stating, “This house is little.” The audience collapses. One of Jonathan’s many inventions was to have Lear forget the Duke of Burgundy’s name every time he mentions it so that he has to be continuously prompted. It was not just because Lear might possibly have thought that all French aristocrats were an effete bunch of poofters but that he was also suffering from early signs of Alzheimer’s. There were so many little human touches in this production that did not escape the brighter critics.

  Jonathan Miller, surgeon, anthropologist, director, author and wit.

  Jonathan, an anthropologist as well as surgeon, mapped Lear’s downward course with the accuracy of a medical chart. After returning to the care of Lear’s daughter Cordelia, I spoke the lines, “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave,” with a slight slur as if Lear had just suffered a stroke, not an impossibility considering his age and the horrors he endured, half naked on the heath. “Pray do not mock me; / I am a very foolish, fond, old man … And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” He is disappearing fast, his head hangs over his chest, his bent figure becomes smaller and smaller—all believable stages of his disintegration. Then, at last, that awesome burst of strength. The death of Cordelia has made him momentarily superhuman as he rails against the world: