Authors: Frank Langella
Dropped Names (10 page)
“Y
ou will arrive on time. You will not be late!”
S
o read the postscript on a note from Stella Adler, the legendary acting teacher, inviting me for tea at her house on Sunshine Drive in Los Angeles. It had come as a result of a tribute I'd been asked to pay her from the stage of the Mark Taper Forum in downtown L.A. in 1990. Earlier in the year I had narrated a PBS special on her life and work. Having then read her book
Truth in Acting
and found it exactly mirrored my thoughts on the subject, I readily agreed to speak.
My comments were brief, succinct, and included an observation that nowhere in the book did she, when discussing the skill, craft, and art of acting, use the words
just be yourself!
This elicited a giant guffaw from Miss Adler, seated front row center. After the ceremony she was surrounded by acolytes and worshippersâShelley Winters, Roddy McDowall, Gordon Davidson, among them; but I decided not to join the throng.
It was several days later when the invitation arrived on deep blue stationery bordered in an even deeper blue trim. It was ostensibly a summons disguised as a thank-you note, so I set out on the appointed day from Pacific Palisades, where I was renting a house with a wife, two kids, a cat, a dog, and some birds.
As I made my way along Mulholland, I looked at the gas gaugeâjust about empty. I would be late. I was about to displease the great lady before having actually met her.
I turned left on Laurel Canyon heading toward the Valley, taking my foot off the pedal and coasting down to a heaven-sent gas station at the bottom. Quick fill and I pulled up moments before my audience with Her Highness.
I would need no help in locating her, having smelled her perfume from the driveway the moment I opened the car door. I was then ushered into a small sunny room where she was sitting upright, hands crossed, resting on her lap, dressed in a pantsuit the color as bright as the lips, her strapless top revealing a good deal of décolletage. She was, at the time, eighty-eight years old; not ever, it would seem, the thought crossing her mind.
“Sit down.”
“Thank you, Miss Adler.”
“Stella, dear. Stella.”
S
tella Adler had an iconic stature as an acting teacher in New York. She was, after all, from an iconic family. Her father and brother, Jacob and Luther, were stars of the Yiddish theatre in New York. She grew up steeped in its traditions and was herself a formidable young actress. She had a daughter, whom she named Ellen Adler, married Harold Clurman, a brilliant critic and devotee of the theatre, divorced and married again. She is reputed to have said to the imposing Clurman, who ranted and raved in his sleep:
“Harold. Don't sleep like a great man. Just sleep!”
I
had been a great admirer of Mr. Clurman's since I first came to New York. He was the author of one of the finest books on a life in the theater I have ever read. It's called
The Fervent Years.
“Tell me about him,” I once said to Stella.
“He saw all,” she said. “One night I was going on about Mike Nichols's extraodinary early success. âHarold,' I said, âisn't it remarkable how successful Mike Nichols has become?'
“ âHe is not a success.' Harold said.
“ âWhat do you mean? He's won a half-dozen Tonys, an Oscar or two,
Barefoot in the Park
,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
,
The Graduate
. Everything he touches turns to gold, how can you say he's not a success?' I must confess I thought he was jealous, but I underestimated him. He looked at me and said again, âHe's not a success.'
“ âWhy not?'
“ âBecause he hasn't had a failure yet.' ”
When I told Mike that story recently, shortly after his eightieth birthday, he ruminated for a moment, then said, “Absolutely correct.”
M
y visits with Stella were less than a dozen, but from them I gained a great deal. Mostly an affirmation of the pragmatic and hard-working approach I have always believed the art of acting requires. Inspiration, she believed, as do I, comes from hard work and discipline. Not an indulgence of the actor's personal neurosis.
In work, she was convinced the thing most needed to keep the spirit alive was curiosity. She was constantly researching and reading and studying. And she valued highly the notion of acting with skill, style, and imagination, but always,
always
in truth. She abhorred The Method, which she felt had nothing to do with the art of acting. She preached imagination not masturbation.
I told her I thought Marlon Brando, once her student, was the great film actor of the twentieth century. “You're right,” she said, “but you don't want to meet him, dear. That way lies madness.” I would have been perfectly happy to risk my sanity.
E
arthy glamour was Stella's style. She was fond of theatrical entrances and exits and I found her grandiosity a welcome manifestation of her unique persona. “You can be as phony as you like in life,” she was fond of saying, “but
never
on the stage.”
That sharp persona was beginning to fray by the time we were becoming acquainted. In one of our last visits one afternoon, she was looking out her window on Sunshine Drive and sighed:
“There is nowhere to go for culture hereâno inspiration. You take a walk and all you see are flowersâ
showing off
.” She then turned from the window, looked at me with wonderment, leaned forward, took my hand, and said:
“Darling, we've been sitting here for several hours now, talking about the theatre, haven't we?”
“Yes.”
“We've been discussing the art of acting, haven't we?”
“Yes.”
“And we've been discussing Strindberg and Ibsen and Chekov, haven't we?”
“Yes.”
“Well darling, I hope you don't mind, but may I askâ
who are you
?”
“It's Frank,” I said. “Frank Langella.”
“Of course it is,” she said quickly, “it's just that you've lost a lot of weight.”
B
efore her final decline, she came to see me in a play in New York and we had a light supper in her apartment afterward. The production was an atrocity and my performance less than my best. She made no comment, but handed me a music box and said: “Keep this near you. Wind it up and let it soothe.”
At a posthumous tribute to her on the stage of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, I wound up tight the small music box she had given me and read a love letter to her from Harold Clurman. A bit of theatrics I think she would have appreciated.
That night in her apartment, along with the box, she gave me even a greater gift.
Having watched my mediocre performance, she kissed me good night and said: “Well that's over and done. Now we move on!”
“T
hat was the one.”
“We're cooking now.”
“Put that one in the time capsule!”
These were among the many superlatives the actor Cameron Mitchell would shout out after another mediocre scene in a ghastly television series entitled
Swiss Family Robinson
in which he played a sailor marooned on their island.
The series was produced by a schlockmeister named Irwin Allen, famous for huge hit films like
The Towering Inferno
and
The Poseidon Adventure
. There was nothing, however, to recommend
Swiss Family Robinson
. It was television at its worst. Conveyor belt cheap, it ran for twenty episodes in the 1975â76 season and hopefully is now and forever lost at sea.
I was invited to do a two-episode arc playing Jean LaFitte, the pirate, the lure being a promise of my own series; but a wasted two weeks of my life wearing a false mustache and embarrassingly falling upon my aluminum sword.
Cameron had been a good-looking leading man in the 1950s, making his Broadway debut as Happy in
Death of a Salesman
, doing the film version and starring in first-rate movies with James Cagney, Clark Gable, and Doris Day.
He was now fifty-eight, a fat, jowly mess, covering his sad decline with an over-the-top wisecracking demeanor; its most heartbreaking manifestation its constancy. From the moment he came on the set everything was just
super
and
terrific
and
fantastic
. His superlatives were mostly ignored by the cast and crew as he spewed them out ad nauseam to no one in particular. It was as if he dare not sit silent for a moment lest he face the depths to which he had descended. Actors who get thrown on the junk heap of our profession enter a purgatory made all the more painful by the glory that once was. And a manifestation of that glory in Cameron's case turned out to be a costume period jacket.
It was hanging on the back of my camp chair. As Cam sat next to me, eyes closed, hands on his belly, snoring, a wardrobe lady came over, picked it up, and held it out for me.
“They're ready for you, Frank,” she said.
The jacket was one of a half dozen I'd tried on from the stockpile of period clothes kept on studio lots. Beautifully made, blue, as I remember, with braiding and epaulets; inside, it had a vintage sewn-in label.
“Look,” I said to the wardrobe lady, “the label's got Cam's name on it.”
It read: “Cameron Mitchell” and the name of the film. My guess is that it might have been from a 1954 film he did with Marlon Brando called
Desirée.
He was slowly coming awake and about to put on his own costume jacket, when she said in a loud clueless voice, “Hey Cam, look at this.” She walked over to him and held it up. “Must be twenty years ago.”
He was not yet up to his bravura self and hardly registered what was happening. “Let's see if it still fits,” she said.
A little group gathered round as she came up behind him, held it up, and slipped in one of his arms. Before he could protest she was pulling in his other arm and yanking the jacket up to his shoulders. People were laughing and turning him around like a top as he awkwardly modeled it for us.
Then his set persona kicked in and he began to spin around, hold his arms out, and do a little
yo ho yo ho
strut. The laughter grew louder as he performed a kind of ridiculous jig in this period jacket now at least two sizes too small for him, making silly noises, kicking up his feet, like a vaudeville clown getting ready to throw a pie.
Everyone thought it was hilarious and seemed not to notice that, with each spin, his face grew redder and redder and his expression more and more frantic.
I walked over to him and waited for his spin to slow down. It did, and he faced me. I then said, “They need me on the set, Cam.” He silently turned around and I gently pulled the jacket from his shoulders. Once it had passed his wrists he moved quickly away toward his trailer, climbed in, and closed the door. As the dresser put it back on me she said: “He's such a good sport.”
The year he died, his face came up on the television screen at the Academy Awards ceremony during the
In Memoriam
section, and I remembered an overweight actor doing a desperate dance trapped in a constricting jacket that had once been tailor-made for him. His name was greeted by a smattering of applause from a room full of people no doubt misguidedly confident that what they were wearing on that particular occasion was forever going to fit.
B
ig guy! Nose, hands, bellyâbig!
I never really knew what a twinkle was until I met Tip O'Neillâbut the look in his eyes as he greeted me could only be described only with that St. Nick cliché. Along with his ruddy cheeks, red nose, and charm to spare, Mr. Claus morphed into the Speaker of the House.
We were in Washington, D.C., on a rainy day in 1992. The Speaker had agreed to a cameo role in a political comedy I was doing entitled
Dave
. The scene required him to stop me getting into a taxi, say a few lines, and leave. A piece of cake. The crew was not ready, so we were settled into a coffee shop near the set.
He took off his trench coat as several actors and assistants gathered round him, pushing a few small tables for two together to form a little circle. He was at its center and held that spot for several hours, being watched over by a female handler right out of central casting; blond, eyeglasses, sensibly suited, sterile demeanor; but thankfully unobtrusive once we were introduced.
The gathering dwindled to just him and me, but he needed very little prodding to keep the conversation going. A lifetime of politics had taught him instant camaraderie and given his endless cache of anecdotes, I remained his captivated listener.
Ninteen ninety-two. It was Clinton vs. Bush and the election was imminent.
O
n Bush:
“As a senator, the guy spent nine and a half minutes on the floor and nine hours at the gym. The day he got elected president, my wife Millie was lying in a hospital sick as a dog. Barbara made a call and Millie got the royal treatment.”
“Bush thinks the presidency was willed to him. He thinks it's his divine right. This time he's gonna be miserable if he loses and miserable if he wins. If he does win, he'll gloat. Barbara told me it's his nature.”
O
n Clinton:
“The guy's a genius. I like him. Women go wet. Met him four years ago with a friend of my daughter. She said, âTip, meet the next president.' ”
O
n limited terms for senators and representatives:
“A stupid idea. The staffs will be running Washington.”
O
n Truman:
“My favorite guy. Got to know him toward the end. Loved him. Loved him.
That
was a president.”
O
n his health:
“I'm wearing a colostomy bag. Look at my teethâblack from radiation. Chemo didn't bother me. I got cancer at seventy-five. I wanted to live. I'm eighty now.”
O
n being an actor:
“I did
Cheers
and it went from sixtieth to first place.”
This he repeated several times during the course of the morning.
“I did
Silver Spoons
too.”
H
e was thoroughly engaging and never at any time did he seem unhappy to be where he wasâhe could play beautifully to an audience of any size and was of course used to being the Star. Until we got on camera. The Speaker was to stop me, say two or three lines, and exit the shot. We rehearsed it a few times. His only objection was to the use of the word
stroke
.
“It's too offensive.”
He was powdered and ready to roll. The word
action
can freeze even the most experienced of professionals, and it froze the Speaker.
This charming, affable man became tongue-tied and wide-eyed when the clapper sounded. His lines, tailored for him, seemed forced and unnatural. After a couple of takes, I asked the director, Ivan Reitman, to just let the camera roll, and we started to chat again as if we were in the restaurant and then I casually asked him to say his first line to me. He did. I responded. He said the next line. We got it. Ivan said, “Cut. Thank you, sir.”
“We got it?” he asked with a large beaming smile. “Well, that was easy.”
We all gathered round him for pictures and he posed happily, his affable charm returning; the deer-in-the-headlights look gone.
I knew I would most likely be forgotten in the Speaker's memory by lunchâone of the thousands he had regaled over the years. And that mattered not at all. It was a profound pleasure to spend four hours with him. However practiced the rhetoric, there was a genuine sense of the original thinker about the man. He didn't have the perfect haircut or the polished all-purpose, politically correct drone and seemed to have no fear of being disliked. This was not a politician out of central casting. Maybe you had to be eighty or to have begun at a time when it was your very uniqueness that moved you to the top; Tip O'Neill was in a class with Harry S. Truman, Barry Goldwater, Thurgood Marshall, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Rooseveltâclever, ruthless, charming sons-of-bitches.
After most everyone had drifted away, I thanked him for the morning chat and for being in the film.
“Nothing to it, my boy,” he said with a wink as the blond lady led him away. “It was a piece of cake!”
