by Rex Reed
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It was all about over at 3 a.m. when model Donyale Luna (who has got to be seen by the human eye to be believed) did the Hokey Pokey Broadway in a filthy-looking two-piece nude fishnet bikini as Dame Edith Evans threw down her menu after two sips of Los Angeles water (it tastes like Geritol), stuck her fingers in her ears to drown out the noise, marched grandly toward the elevator, fed up with Oscar and his kingdom, and went home for a bowl of cornflakes.
I don’t blame her. Now I’ve met Oscar myself in person, and if I ever see him again it’ll be on television.
Uta Hagen
Take 1: Uta Hagen, actress, appearing onstage for the first time in six years in Eva LeGallienne’s APA revival of The Cherry Orchard. Reclining on a chaise longue that has seen happier days, smoking a sad brown cigarette, laughing a throaty croak in a voice somewhere south of Marjorie Main’s, and draping her beige chiffon gown about her legs with one last ounce of aristocratic dignity before the ax falls on Madame Ranevskaya’s cherry trees. Trying to blend into the production without standing out like a star, but standing out anyway, unable to harness the energy and magic that have made her one of the theatre’s most exciting monoliths. She could have been a movie star, too, if she wanted to. She didn’t. She could be rich if she wanted to. She doesn’t. She long ago turned her back on money, stardom, on working for the sake of working, and yet she remains a legend without a marquee to announce itself. Except for rare occasions, like The Cherry Orchard.
“It’s the first thing since Virginia Woolf I’ve wanted to do. The part has always fascinated me. Chekhov is difficult to play because what is seemingly true on the surface is never a direct line to the character. I won’t get to the heart of this character for months to come, and we’re only doing it for some 40-odd performances. I won’t get bored. Another reason I’m doing it is Eva LeGallienne. She gave me my first chance and I hadn’t worked with her in 31 years, so I was anxious to be a part of her production.”
The voice is low-pitched, enthusiastic and always close to the verge of laughter as she tells the story: “When I was 17, I wrote her a passionate letter from Wisconsin, where my father was a professor. I was full of ideals and I told her I wanted to be a serious artist and only play Shakespeare and Ibsen. I was coming to New York with my parents for two weeks and could I meet her? Well, I met her and read for her and then I went back home and enrolled for college and the day I got home from enrolling I had a letter from her asking me to play Ophelia to her Hamlet in a company she was forming in Massachusetts. That was a wonderful summer, but the company disbanded in the fall and although I was only 18, it was the end of the American theatre for me. My heart broke. I went back home and squawked so much my family let me return to New York, where I lived on $6.50 a week for months, doing the rounds from 9 to 6 every day. The following January I got an audition with the Lunts and made my Broadway debut as Nina in The Sea Gull. Going to the opening of Cherry Orchard the other night in a taxi, it suddenly occurred to me that I was opening once again on Broadway exactly 30 years to the month I made my debut. And in all those years I never played a small part. Maybe I should have.”
Instead, the critics made her celebrated before she was old enough to know the meaning of the word. From The Sea Gull in 1938 she went directly to a play in summer stock in which she had to flatten her leading man, José Ferrer, with a pair of boxing gloves. A few months later, in December, she married him. The marriage lasted ten turbulent years; their daughter, Leticia, is now 27 and married to an actor named Brandwell Teuscher (“The wedding sounded like a scene from a Bronte novel—‘I Leticia take thee Brandwell,’” jokes Uta with typical Hagen humor). It was also the period when she came as close as she ever got to being a movie star. “People always ask why I never made movies. I was very snobby about it. I never wanted to do commercial trash even in the beginning, and I went around saying ‘I’m an artiste, I don’t do commercial things’ and so on. Now I’d like to try it, but it’s too late. Just as it is too late to go back and play Saint Joan again. I played her before I was ready, I think. I once told Dame Sybil Thorndike I thought I was too old to play the part again and she said, ‘Oh no, my deah, you can never be too old to play Saint Joan, you can only be too young.’
“Anyway, in 1939 Joe Ferrer and I were both swept off to Hollywood, where for about three months a great to-do was made over us and we were tested by all the studios. We hated Hollywood. One studio would make a fuss over me and not want Joe and the next one would want him and not me. It nearly wrecked our marriage. So we fled in the middle of the night and all the way back to New York we got telegrams begging us to come back. At every filling station the price would go up. I never went back and I have no regrets.”
So she concentrated on the theatre, playing Desdemona to Paul Robeson’s famous Othello, Blanche to a host of Stanleys in A Streetcar Named Desire, and a brassy blond film star in a quick flop called In Any Language, which she did because “I was flat broke and I thought it would be a hit since it was written by two Bob Hope writers and directed by George Abbott. I took it for all the wrong reasons so I deserved what I got. That’s when I decided never to appear in anything again I didn’t believe in. And I haven’t.”
She began teaching with Herbert Berghof in 1947 and married him in 1951, spicing her classroom schedule and her efforts to raise money for their school with fewer roles but greater triumphs, like The Country Girl and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “People get mad at me and say it’s a scandal. ‘You should be working every season,’ they tell me. Then I ask, ‘What did you see this season you think I should have been in?’ This is always followed by dead silence. Ninety-five percent of the things I turn down either never open or they close in one week. I’m bored and disillusioned by the commercial theater. By the time a play opens so many people, from the angels to the producers, have speculated on how much money it will bring in that you no longer get the real McCoy. We’ve overpriced ourselves right out of business, from the real estate owner who gets a third of the cut right down to the carpenters’ union and the scenic shops. Every time a union scale goes up, somebody is out of a job. Then the English come in and undercut us and the critics become Anglophiles and decide the English are better actors. It all comes back down to an economic problem. It’s grotesque and cockeyed, so I stay out of it. But just because I’m not working on Broadway doesn’t mean I’m sitting around on my laurels doing nothing. I teach four classes a week and act in projects at my studio, where the work counts. You must function. Other actors don’t have a studio, so they must express themselves by doing commercial trash. I don’t have to do that.”
So Uta Hagen takes home her weekly paycheck as a teacher (“one-tenth of what I could get on Broadway if I did all the junk I’m offered”) and repairs the toilet in the studio. “Acting is my work,” she says, “but the studio is my life.” Not that she doesn’t give equal concentration to both. Once, while playing opposite Anthony Quinn in a tour of Streetcar, the lights did not go out in the scene where Stanley is supposed to attack Blanche. Quinn dragged her to the bed, where he remained stupefied, not knowing what to do next. Uta knew. “Rape me, you idiot,” she gasped, “rape me!”
Take 2: Uta Hagen, teacher, property owner, and dedicated idealist, dealing stacked decks of theatrical knowledge to 900 eager students a week in a renovated stable on Bank Street called the HB Studio. The Russian grande dame of The Cherry Orchard is nowhere around. She has been replaced by a rumpled, rusty-haired lady wielding a hammer, wearing pants and a railroad conductor’s cap, sipping coffee from a paper cup, and waiting patiently to be photographed under a bulletin board where a note by one of her students reads: “Dear Mommie: Will you please leave me in peace, Mommie? I’m not coming home, for God’s sake. Break a leg (and I mean it.) José.”
She leads the way past admiring students (“When are you coming back to class? We miss you.”), showing off her school like a proud mama. In a neighboring building, she points out a 75-seat theatre,
where plays by aspiring playwrights are staged by the studio. “We’re expanding. This building belonged to someone we called the Cat Woman. A character right out of Tennessee Williams. It cost more to fumigate than it did to buy the building. With all the building permits and zoning laws, it was two years before we could move inside.” The three buildings which now make up the HB Studio still need work and, more important, money, since almost everybody works there out of love. “We never have enough money. But we have a dream. Herbert started out when he was a refugee, with a language problem, and he saw all the actors, sitting around in Walgreen’s with no place to talk or work or develop their craft. Now we hope to do more than just teach acting. We want our own theatre. The American theatre is underrated, undersold, underdeveloped, unexplored and unappreciated. I hope that out of this studio will explode an acting company of the finest quality guided by first-rate directors and playwrights with an aim. Then perhaps we will make a real contribution to the theatre. In my Broadway and other commercial work I become periodically disillusioned, but this is the only place where I have known real fulfillment.”
Take 3: Uta Hagen, the woman. Forbiddingly experienced in life as she is onstage. Deriving as much pleasure from making a flower bloom as playing Saint Joan. Opinionated, articulate, brainy and charming. Sitting in her living room looking down on Washington Square in an old building which, on the day of the interview, is out of both heat and hot water, and where someone with a dirty mind has scrawled a four-letter word in the elevator. “This is where I loaf. I’m a slob, really. In my supermarket in the Village one day I heard one of the checkers tell a customer, ‘See that woman over there—she goes around pretending she’s a Broadway star,’ and I looked around to see whom she was talking about and I realized it was me!”
She falls back on the sofa, slapping her knee at the lunacy in such a notion. With her schedule, she never has time to put on the tiaras and the false eyelashes and the star-face. “The only real vacation I ever had was in 1961 when Herbert was in Cleopatra. We cashed in his first-class ticket to Rome and bought two tourist fares and I had a glorious time. We were in Rome from September to June and in all that time he only worked eight days! We lived on his daily expense money and saved his salary to buy our second building for the studio. We also have a house in Montauk where we go for three months every summer and I do nothing but garden. I grow all my own daisies and zinnias and do all my own canning and bake my own bread. I love flowers and sometimes I even go out and water them at 4 a.m. by flashlight. Then in the fall I spray everything with dried blood and cover it with salt hay and manure to keep the wild deer from eating my bulbs in the winter. I never go to the theatre and seldom go to the movies. Herbert goes, but I don’t. I look at acting all day long, so I don’t want to go out in the evening and look at it some more. Between the studio and Montauk and my own schedule, I don’t have time. In my spare time, I cook. You can criticize anything in my acting, but don’t attack my cooking. Come see my Christmas present.”
She beckons me past walls of paintings and awards and bookcases crowded with Kafka and Freud and Willa Cather to her favorite room, the kitchen. “I have my own noodle machine and an ancient six-burner stove where I can keep a lot of pots going at once. This,” she points proudly, “is my prize possession. It’s called a Ronson automatic food preparation center. It is equipped with all-electric meat grinders, blenders, ice crushers, the works. You should see the meals I cook up on this thing. I grow all my own herbs, and organically grown vegetables.” She snaps out a photo of Uta Hagen, not looking like anybody’s idea of a great actress of the serious theatre, holding two home-grown zucchinis bigger than bowling pins. “This is what life is all about.”
She means it. And as long as she is talking about the things that move her, she is a happy, headstrong, radiant broth of a lady, involved to her fingertips with the business of not getting trapped in the suffocatingly small world of show business. But mention acting and she stiffens, begins to actually shake visibly. “A man from CBS called me and asked me to go on TV to explain my acting technique last week, and I think he was quite insulted when I said no. I do not talk about my technique or how I teach it. I am bored to death by TV programs, discussions and newspaper interviews about how to act. You never see musicians discuss how they hold their bows, or painters telling how they hold their brushes. I was asked to write a book about acting in 1955 and I stupidly signed a contract and spent the advance. I never finished it and I never will, because there are no blanket statements to solve the riddle of acting. It’s a technique by which a person discovers within himself certain behavior patterns, then brings them to life onstage. Every actor is different, with a whole new endless cycle of problems to solve. In addition, every individual has a certain radiance or quality to communicate which has nothing to do with acting. Talent is cheap, star quality is something entirely different. I don’t know if I have that or not. Who’s a star and who isn’t? If making a million dollars means you’re a star, then I’m not a star. Girls on TV panel shows can outdraw me, but I know I’m a better actress. Yet when I leave the stage door nobody recognizes me. Whenever people asked me for an autograph, they used to look at it and then say, ‘Yewta Haygen, who’s that?’ Now I ask them whose autograph they want before I sign, because I know they can swap ten Uta Hagens for one Paul Newman.”
You can’t be a star in Montauk. And today, at 48, the problem does not cross her mind. “Oh once, when I was young—before I was even 20—I was in Key Largo at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with Paul Muni and Joe Ferrer and I had just gotten notices like you wouldn’t believe and I got pretty drunk on my own perfume and thought I was terribly important. So I got into a cab one day and said very haughtily to the driver, ‘Take me to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, puh-leeze,’ and the cabbie turned around and said, ‘The what theatre? Lissen, lady, I been a hack for 20 years and I ain’t never heard of no Ethel Barrymore.’ It taught me a lesson for the rest of my life.”
Simone Signoret
The interview with Simone Signoret is set for two o’clock. She is thirty minutes late and nowhere in sight. Her suite at the Plaza doesn’t answer, and trying to get through to the publicity department at Warner Brothers-Seven Arts to find out what’s going wrong is like trying to put through a person-to-person call to the Apollo 8. For reasons never clear to the people who have to interview actors on press junkets, but best understood by the kind of people who schedule such circuses, it seems that someone has brought most of the stars of The Sea Gull over from Europe at the same time. Now they are all scattered throughout the city missing appointments and losing their schedules—in varying degrees of undisciplined temperament—like high-school kids on a Beta Club convention. I walk through the candy-box lobby of the Plaza and phone again. “Try the Edwardian Room—I saw some of them go in there a little while ago,” says the operator with a slight trace of hysteria in the voice.
There she is. I don’t know what people expect her to be like from the roles she plays, but she’s no fading Colette heroine. Nowhere is there a trace of the ripened older woman from Room at the Top, inspiring passions in younger men. She’s no femme fatale, either. The tender qualities she showed in her early films like Casque d’Or—which the slick magazines used to describe as “lyricism in a country bed”—are only youthful memories now. Her manner is tough. There’s a rough, fruit-peel texture to her skin. A hard smile braces the edges of her mouth. She has broad, fullback shoulders and short, masculine hands—scruffy, with broken nails, like a scrubwoman’s—which punctuate the air with brisk, expressive karate chops. She wears little makeup, her hair—once described by Time magazine as “chablis-colored”—is now rinsed into an unstylish mop with a mind of its own, and maybe it’s my imagination, but the air around her table seems slightly blue, possibly from being sprayed with so many four-letter words.
“Don’t tell me your name,” she says, “because I am French and we never hear names. It will just go right in one ear and out the other. I will
just call you Mr. New York Times. This is David Warner.” Warner, who starred in Morgan and now plays the very British-sounding Russian son of the very French-sounding Signoret in The Sea Gull, extends a limp hand. “I hate this room. They didn’t want to let me in without a tie,” he says, shaking his hair, which is long enough to braid, and blinking his eyes nervously behind oblong glasses thick enough to see the moon through. Signoret then introduces Mrs. Warner, a round-faced young Swedish morsel who looks like a stand-in for Candy, and Moura Budberg, an elderly Russian dowager who translated and adapted the film version of Chekhov’s play. Miss Budberg stares coldly at the intruder from a hooded cape, looking very much like an old photo of Isak Dinesen. “The old hag claims to be a baroness,” says Signoret, “but we all suspect her of being an old Russian phony.” Miss Budberg cackles, enjoying the insult. They’ve all been drinking several bottles of white wine and they’re all a bit smashed.
“We should all drink nothing but champagne and eat nothing but caviar,” says Mr. Warner, “and charge it all to Warner Brothers. They expect it, you know. They charge it all to taxes anyway.”
“I hate these publicity trips,” adds Signoret. “We only came so we could all be together again. I know you always hear actors on publicity trips say, ‘I love my co-stars’ and ‘Oh, God, what an experience!’ and it’s all bull crap, but this time it’s true. We all loved each other in The Sea Gull, didn’t we, David?”
“Oh, yes,” says Warner, picking up the cue, “we all loved each other.”
There is a telephone call from James Mason, another co-star. “Well, bring it to the table,” scolds Signoret. “I refuse to walk across the room. Don’t you have any of those little white phones like they have at the Beverly Hills Hotel?” Somebody finds a phone and plugs it in. “Hello, this is Miss Signoret. No, I do not wish to make a call. You are calling me! No, no, I had a call from Mr. James Mason. Mason! M-A-S-O-N … My God, what kind of place is this? They never heard of James Mason!” She slams down the receiver. “I hate this hotel. I tried to get the Algonquin, but the people at Warners are all such idiots, they can’t do anything right. I’ve been here two days and they still have not given me any spending money. I never carry my own money on publicity trips.”
