Shattered Love

by Richard Chamberlain

  There were offers for some new television series that perked up my spirits a bit, but I turned them down because I had big ideas about expanding into features and theater. I did several summer stock productions to get some theatrical training, but the brief rehearsal periods (usually about one week) didn’t allow much exploration. Then I was offered Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a big Broadway musical with Mary Tyler Moore as Holly Golightly. Abe Burrows was writing and directing, David Merrick producing, Bob Merrill was doing the music, and Michael Kidd was choreographing. It sounded too good to pass up so I leapt in.

  After rehearsing in New York, we opened for a month’s run in Philadelphia to mixed reviews. The gypsies and probably just about everybody else in the production started to smell trouble early on. I was oblivious and having a ball. When we played another month in Boston amid constant script and song changes, even I began to see dark problems looming.

  Edward Albee (who made that choice?) was brought in to rewrite the show, and while he charmed us all personally, he transformed our lighthearted musical into a dark and rather gloomy semiopera.

  After Boston we closed for two weeks to rehearse Albee’s new material and finally opened to previews on Broadway. Well, with the exception of parts of Oklahoma!, New Yorkers had never seen a dark and gloomy musical before and they hated us. They shouted rude remarks and walked out in droves. Merrick closed Tiffany’s after just four previews with a self-serving announcement in the New York Times saying he was losing a bundle but wanted to save New York from a lousy show. Despite a huge advance ticket sale, we closed before we opened.

  I’d never known professional failure before and I was stunned and heartbroken. Mary gave an emotional closing night party at Sardi’s. Around two in the morning, I staggered out on the street and walked drunkenly to our theater to see my name “up in lights” for the last time. I’d had such high hopes for the show—it was like losing a dear friend. I broke down sobbing. And to further complicate things, my self-image was in big trouble—I needed a major overhaul. I thought I was finally a big star, beyond failure. What was going on?

  I limped back to Los Angeles, my frazzled tail between my legs, and sought the consultation of old friends. Show business veterans like Angela Lansbury, Gower Champion, and Ruth Gordon assured me that failure was an integral part of our business, and that it was good for me to experience a whopper of a flop early in my career. My wounds healed more quickly than I expected.

  THE SEVENTIES

  One of the exciting and scary things about an acting career is surprise—you never know what’s going to happen (or not happen) next. Following the dreadful demise of Tiffany’s, the hot, innovative young film director Richard Lester, who followed up his groundbreaking Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night with a witty comedy called The Knack and the Beatles’ second film, Help!, asked to see me in London about a part in his new film, Petulia. It was to star Julie Christie, George C. Scott, and Shirley Knight. I got on a plane posthaste. Meeting in his office, Lester said he wanted me for the part of Julie’s neurotic, sometimes violent husband, David. He described the character as “a great-looking, but empty Coke bottle” and said with a wry half grin that he thought I’d be perfect. I felt the dig and instantly worried that my Magic Show might be slipping; but the man was offering me a swell job. With a wry half grin of my own, I said yes.

  This would be my first serious film, my first job as a grown-up, my chance to graduate as an actor into the real thing.

  We filmed Petulia in Sausalito (before that charming seaside town was choked by tourists) just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It was 1967 and the hippie scene was in full flower—so many beautiful, open-faced young people everywhere, gliding through their lives in a rainbow haze of almost angelic loveliness before the drugs took their toll. Here’s part of a letter I wrote to Joe about living in Sausalito:

  Life is fantastic here. My boathouse is tied up right at the tip end of the pier, with a splendid view of San Francisco Bay and various islands and peninsulas. It’s a rather rustic affair built on a rectangular barge, consisting of a front sundeck, one good-sized room with a fireplace made from an old, rusty, round buoy with a laughing mouth cut in it…. I could sit here, bobbing as the boats go by, watching fingers of fog advance and retreat over the various hills, drinking home-brewed beer (a gift from my landlord) and stoking old Laughing Buoy forever.

  Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead in all their soulful, Southern Comfort–drenched glory were in the movie. We filmed their scenes during all-night marathons in the Fairmont Hotel lobby in San Francisco. When we finished at dawn we’d all drive back to Sausalito, have a blurry breakfast by the sea, and find our way back to our houseboats for an all-day sleep. The whole shoot was an utterly magical time and I got to play rough with Julie Christie!

  Working with Julie was amazing. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on. Though rather small, she somehow had the majestic, untamed quality of a wild horse. I found her to be the most gorgeous, fascinating, professional, unpredictable, charming, bright, bullying, feminine, haunted, funny, frightening creature I’d ever met.

  We seemed to be working well together, though I didn’t have the faintest idea how my work in the picture was going. Richard Lester was a marvelous director—though quite mysterious and complicated. He pushed his actors in very odd, unexpected directions, and you found yourself doing things you hadn’t imagined at all. As puzzling as all this was at first, I think Lester helped me break through the somewhat calculated approach I had brought to my craft. At least in my art, if not in my life, I was allowing some spontaneity to break through my iron control.

  Julie was living with her British boyfriend (almost as beautiful as Julie) on a very grand houseboat just down the bay from my much smaller one. I liked him, and they seemed a perfect couple. But Warren Beatty was in town and on the prowl. He circled around Julie for a time and then pounced. Warren, in his voracious prime, was irresistible; Julie succumbed.

  Though I admired his intelligent tough-guy acting, I didn’t get to know George C. Scott at all. Between scenes he would retire to his dressing room trailer to smoke cigars and play poker with his cronies. I suspect that beneath his sizzling bravura he was rather shy.

  Richard Lester, who pretended to be a Brit himself, had found a way around Hollywood unions and assembled an almost totally British crew for Petulia. Being in the charming company of so many English folk solidified a plan I’d been considering for some time. I wanted to expand my horizons by getting some solid acting training, and the famous acting academies in London seemed the place to find the most inclusive curriculum. Shortly after making Petulia I rented my house in L.A. and took off for England.

  Once again fate’s finger began to stir. The day after I arrived in London my agent at William Morris said the BBC was looking for an American actor to play Ralph Touchett in a six-hour television production of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady. I quickly read the book (as quickly as you can read a thousand pages of James’s brilliantly complex writing) and loved both the story and the tragic character of Ralph. I signed on for what was to be a wonderfully intense learning experience. Working with James Cellan Jones, our superb director, and the excellent cast taught me more in a short time than I might have learned in formal training at one of England’s famous acting schools. This on-the-job training continued the entire four and a half years I lived and worked in England.

  Peter Dews was running the legendary Birmingham Repertory Company and directing many of its productions at the time. The company was running a small deficit, and Peter was looking for a well-known actor to play Hamlet—someone who might perk up their box-office sales. One night Peter and his wife, Ann, were watching The Portrait of a Lady on the BBC and he turned to her and said, “There’s our Hamlet!” Ann fell off the sofa laughing at this absurdity, but Peter persisted. To my total amazement he offered me one of the greatest and most elusive characters in dramatic literature.

&n
bsp; I worked fervently on the play for weeks with several teachers; all of them advised me as diplomatically as possible to avoid embarrassment and decline. With enormous regret I asked my agent to turn it down.

  The night before my negative decision would be final I awoke in a sweat saying out loud “I’ve got to do it! I’ve got to do it!” We called Peter the next day and said if he would agree to work with me on the part for a couple of months before we went into actual rehearsal I’d give Hamlet my best try. He said he would, and I took the terrifying leap.

  Though Peter taught me a great deal about playing Shakespeare during those two months, the first five weeks of rehearsal were a desperate trial for all of us. The splendid actress Gemma Jones was playing Ophelia, and her performance grew more and more exciting by the day. I was working like a fiend, but my habitual fears and inhibitions kept me tied in knots. At the end of the fifth week Peter called me into his office in despair. “What are we going to do? I’m at my wit’s end. It just isn’t happening,” he almost moaned. Shaken, I replied that I thought when we got into run-throughs the sixth and final week that I’d begin to pick up steam. Having no alternative, Peter agreed.

  And, thank God, I did begin to come alive as Hamlet the final week of rehearsal. At last things were looking up, until the day before opening night, when quite by accident I found out that all the London critics would be coming up to Birmingham to review this upstart American interloper. I thought we were far enough away from London to be safe from media surveillance. This news that the critics were storming our gates struck me like The Hammer of Doom.

  Before the opening night curtain, the general expectation of disaster was so tangible in our ancient theater (the Birmingham Rep until this moment had had a glorious history) that you could almost reach out and touch the tension. This malign atmosphere crept into my body, voice, and mind like a malevolent demon. I managed to get through the first scene croaking my lines in a strangled voice and strutting around stiffly on legs that couldn’t seem to bend. But in the next scene when Hamlet is told of the appearance on the battlements of his great father’s ghost, I dried up completely, and my terror left me deaf to all prompting. Finally after what seemed like hours of silence, my memory resurrected and I was off and running.

  Instead of ridiculing my performance, which I was later told they had come to do, the critics seemed to find my eccentric interpretation (distorted as it was by terror) rather novel and interesting. Most of their reviews were quite good. Thanks largely to Peter Dews’s patient tutoring and direction, I had actually pulled it off.

  Having graduated from pretty boy to actor, I was at last taken seriously, and it was an exhilarating experience. Some fascinating work followed The Portrait of a Lady and Hamlet. Ken Russell cast me as Tchaikovsky in his bizarre film The Music Lovers, with the astonishing Glenda Jackson. I played Octavius Caesar in a dreadful film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with Charlton Heston as Antony and Jason Robards (who saw straightaway that the film was a loser) as Brutus. Robert Bolt cast me as Lord Byron in his film Lady Caroline Lamb, which also starred my great friend Margaret Leighton. At around the same time, I traveled to Nice to work with Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Madwoman’s producers were the last of the big spenders, and we were all put up at the fabulous La Voile d’Or Hotel in Cap Ferrat, one of the most gorgeous places on earth. A good deal of this movie was shot outdoors, so they had to keep one indoor scene called a “cover set” ready in case of bad weather. The cover set was a long scene between me and Donald Pleasence, and since the weather stayed sunny we got to hang around the south of France for the entire three-month shoot—the ultimate working holiday!

  One clear Sunday afternoon I climbed out of the chilly Mediterranean after a long swim and headed toward the hotel. It was still off-season and the veranda was empty except for three august figures sitting at a small table with a bottle of champagne. The three were Katharine Hepburn, Danny Kaye, and Federico Fellini.

  Fellini was married to Giulietta Masina and had been visiting his wife and our production for several days.

  Fellini was at the height of his fame as Europe’s greatest film director, having taken the world by storm with a number of marvelous and innovative movies. These included the unforgettable and rather surreal 8½, and Juliet of the Spirits, which was full of symbolism delving deeply into Juliet’s unconscious mind. His frequent appearances on our film set wearing a very theatrical flowing overcoat and broad-brimmed hat were unnerving to say the least for our director, Bryan Forbes. It was rather like trying to play a round of golf with Tiger Woods looking over your shoulder.

  As I approached, still dripping from my swim, the mighty three asked me to come sit with them and I happily did. This was a once-in-a-lifetime trio worth listening to.

  Their conversation had become a bit heated. Hepburn, who as usual was doing her best to hide her real femininity in army fatigues, was saying, “Oh, Federico, your early movies were just fine, straightforward, realistic. But then, like that crazy Picasso, you’ve gone berserk. I mean, that absurd Juliet of the Spirits? What on earth was that all about?”

  I was so shocked that anyone, even Hepburn, would dare speak like that to the high potentate of world cinema that I barely heard what followed. Anyway, Kate, having finished her pronouncement, stalked off to her villa. She liked to dine and be asleep by eight o’clock.

  Watching Kate climb the stairs and disappear, Fellini said with a touch of sadness, “She is afraid of the night. She is afraid of her dreams.”

  I played Hamlet again in an entirely new production for Hallmark Television. Again this was a huge stretch for me, because Sir John Gielgud, one of the greatest Hamlets ever, played the Ghost; Sir Michael Red-grave was a very dotty Polonius; and the great Margaret Leighton played Gertrude. One day on the set Sir John asked me what other Shakespearean parts I’d played. I said sheepishly, “None,” to which he replied imperiously, “I never played any of the smaller parts either.” Also during my stay in England we filmed Norman Rosemont’s television movie The Man in the Iron Mask in France. The rarest treat of that production was working with another of the British acting greats: Sir Ralph Richardson.

  Though I returned to the States for work several times during my years in England, I was growing more and more attached to my British friends and to the ancient culture of that sceptered isle. America seemed young and brash by comparison, and I thought for a time that I might stay on permanently.

  Two factors changed my mind. By the beginning of my fifth year as an apprentice Englishman, I was starting to feel like a welcome visitor at a club to which I would never fully belong. Then the clincher: During a meeting in London with a Hollywood director, he asked (noticing the slight British accent I’d acquired by osmosis) if I thought I could still play American parts. Flash!—It was time to go home.

  Packing up my apartment overlooking Hyde Park was an extremely sad business. This wasn’t just any move—I knew I was ending an incredibly rich and importantly creative era of my life and inevitably distancing myself from my much-loved London friends. It was a bit like dying.

  And yet, once I was resettled in the little hillside house I bought in L.A. during my Kildare days, and reconnected with my L.A. friends, I was glad to be home.

  Feature film and television work was plentiful if occasionally below snuff. I did two features for the hot producer of disaster movies, Irwin Allen. The big one was The Towering Inferno, starring Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, and O.J. Simpson. Irwin Allen had two great gimmicks. He would hire as many name stars as he could lure with big bucks, and he would use first-class special effects.

  Inferno was shot almost entirely on one huge ballroom set where the characters were all trapped by fire. It was amazing to watch all these huge stars hanging out together, shooting the breeze between scenes. As I remember, a fair amount of beer was downed during these gab sessions. Usually the big names hung ou
t together, but I noticed that classy Fred Astaire seemed more comfortable talking with the crew.

  Though I knew Paul Newman socially, I had never worked with him before. I was surprised by the intense arguments that sprang up between him and the director just before shooting each of his scenes. After a few days of this I guessed they had a sort of unspoken agreement to get fighting mad at each other before each take in order to get Paul juiced up for his scene. This acting technique was new to me.

  My character was the villain responsible for the catastrophic fire. I made the big mistake of playing him like a jerk from the beginning instead of keeping his nefarious nature disguised in strong good-guy clothes until his evil deeds were finally exposed.

  Steve McQueen’s performance was a stunner. His part as written was just inches away from dreary. But with his flashing blue eyes and his rare superstar charisma as well as his enormous savvy as a screen actor, Steve transformed his standard fire chief character into a star vehicle. As disaster films go, The Towering Inferno was a winner.

  My second film for Irwin Allen, The Swarm, was somewhat less towering. It was studded with stars of a slightly older variety: Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and José Ferrer. We were all fighting off hordes of killer bees invading the United States from South America.

  Computerized special effects hadn’t yet hit their stride so we used real bees. Thousands of these little critters were kept in refrigerated railway cars. The cold made them drowsy and slow, enabling a bunch of expert women chosen for their small hands to gently squeeze each bee belly and snip off its stinger. During our death scenes hundreds of these newly revived, but stingerless bees were poured over us as we writhed and screamed and at last expired in feigned terror and pain. Having those insects crawling over my face and down my neck into my clothes was a sensation not easily forgotten.