Authors: Frank Langella
Dropped Names (14 page)
“A
tta girl!” Susan Hayward barked at Jo Van Fleet as Jo successfully stole a two shot in which they were sparring during the shooting of the 1955 film
I'll Cry Tomorrow.
“Susan taught me how to fight and stand up for myself,” Jo told me.
Tough. Tough. Tough. Tough as nails she was. A ball buster, my Italian uncles would have said. No one was going to get the best of her. Jo was one of the finest dramatic actresses of her time. She is most remembered now as James Dean's mother in
East of Eden
and for receiving an Oscar nomination from only ten minutes onscreen at the end of Paul Newman's
Cool Hand Luke.
She ate our director for lunch and tried to have me as dessert. The year was 1966. I was appearing opposite the actress Gloria Foster in Garcia Lorca's
Yerma
at Lincoln Center. The play was about to close and I was asked to reprise a role for television that I'd done off-Broadway in a play called
Good Day
, about a young man who applies to an old lady for a job and is slowly sapped of his youth and energy as she grows younger. My costar had been Nancy Marchand, who achieved her greatest success in
The Sopranos
but died in 2001 of the cigarettes she couldn't leave alone.
At the time Jo was a big star and the network offered her Nancy's role. I called Nancy and said:
“I don't want to do it without you.”
“Don't be an asshole,” she said, and hung up.
Jo was belligerent, hostile, and brilliant. She couldn't put a foot wrong in the part. Her steely intelligence and razor-sharp delivery suited the role perfectly.
“Good morning, Miss Van Fleet,” the director would say.
“What's good about it?” Jo barked.
He made a suggestion:
“You want me to do
what
?”
I'd try a new move somewhere:
“Is he gonna do
that
?”
There wasn't enough time for her to find all the depths of her character. There never is in television, but she worked tirelessly. She was a towering presence as an actress, but a woman so desperate for love, that all she could do was push away any kindness that came her way, for fear of admitting how much she needed it.
After we taped the show, I walked over and told her she was one of the greats.
“Yeah, yeah! Stop blowing smoke,” she said.
Y
ears passed as she descended into a drunken recluse, making enemies of just about anybody who could give her a job and became virtually unemployable. She could often be seen wandering around the Upper West Side of New York, looking like a bag lady talking to herself.
In 1984, I was appearing opposite Dianne Wiest in the Arthur Miller play
After the Fall
. Jo came to a matinee and told the stage manager to come and get me. I changed quickly and found her sitting on the stage in one of the permanent benches on the set, looking out into the house. I stood in the door for a few seconds remembering her thrilling performance in
Oh Dad, Poor Dad
. . . some twenty-five years earlier and wondering what she must be thinking. And then I walked down the aisle to greet her.
“Hi Jo.”
“Hey, baby. Geez what a fucking crybaby Miller is.”
“Well, Marilyn was no picnic.”
“He didn't
have
to marry her for Chrissakes.”
Dianne knew she was there and came through the house down the aisle to pay her respects. In her little-girl voice she said, “It's such an honorâ”
“Yeah thanks,” Jo said and cut her dead. Dianne excused herself and disappeared. When she was gone I said:
“Jo, you didn't have to do that.”
“What?” she said.
“Treat my leading lady that way.”
“Don't give me that shit.
I'm
your leading lady.”
She said nothing about my performance or the production; but sat there and railed against Arthur and his treatment of women in the play.
“The guy's a chauvinist asshole,” she said.
It was now about 5:30 and I wanted to eat and take a nap before the evening performance. Jo fell silent and stared at the floor.
“Is there anything I can get you, Jo?”
“Yeah,” she said. “A job.”
B
ob Mitchum was testing me. And if I didn't pass, the next seven weeks in Mexico were going to be hell.
The Wrath of God
was my first movie western and I was going to have to ride hard, shoot a gun, and act with the legendary Mr. Mitchum. My second day's shooting would be with him. The action would require me to gallop full speed through a dusty town at the head of a gang of Mexican thugs, rear my horse in front of a church, command him up the steps, and bring him to a halt in the chapel, confronting Mr. Balls himself with my gun drawn.
It was 1972. This was only my third picture and I rode about as well as a six-month-old baby. I took a dozen lessons before I got to Mexico and I could stay on, stop and start, but I wasn't fooling the wranglers.
“Fucking New York actors,” I'd hear muttered, as I spent most of my time in the saddle at a forty-five-degree angle, holding a gun about as convincingly as a nun.
I had managed the long gallop through town (eventually cut from the picture) pretty well and come up to the church door. All outdoor shots completed, I was to rehearse with Mitchum at the end of the day to prepare for shooting the scene inside the church the next morning.
Still in costume, dirty and tired from a full day, and uncharacteristically nervous, I watched Mitchum come strolling out of his trailer, wearing an oversized fur-lined hooded jacket, and take his place behind the pulpit, some script pages in his hand. Ralph Nelson, the director, introduced us.
“How do you do, sir,” I said.
“Hey,” he said to Ralph. “Proper, ain't he?”
“Why don't we have you enter on the horse, Frank,” Ralph said. “Do you want to take him up the steps yourself?”
“Yes,” I lied.
I mounted, kicked, and pushed, but my
caballo
did not want to pray. He came up to the steps but stopped dead. I could see Mitchum, at the end of the country church, standing by the pulpit waiting to say his first line. By my third attempt, he'd sat down on a tall camp chair to wait it out.
The wrangler said, “Why don't you just walk him up the steps. We'll work on it later.”
“No,” I said, circled round, and rode to the back of the square. Then I kicked hard and went into a gallop. We got to the steps, I kicked again, and up he sailed, carrying me and my balls to victoryâshort-lived as it was. I landed in the center of the church, shifted back to the center of the saddle, awkwardly drew my gun, feeling and looking about as comfortable as the New York stage actor I was.
My first line, shouted at Mitchum across the echoing hall, rang out:
“Priest!”
His response was to be:
“I am here, Tomas De La Plata,” my character's name.
Instead, I heard:
“Yeah, motherfucker.”
A loud chorus of whoops and laughter came from the crew gathered around watching as I dismounted. I played the scene exactly as written, while Mitchum ad-libbed one profanity after another. I never laughed, never ad-libbed. Somehow I knew that if I allowed myself to find Mr. Mitchum funny or took on his dismissive attitude to the work, he'd own me. So I pressed on, speaking admittedly terrible dialogue with complete conviction. It was a tense and difficult ten minutes. When I said my last line, walked to my horse and started to mount, he said:
“Let's run it again.” He then put down the pages and played the scene flawlessly, just like the Movie Star I had so admired. I'd passed.
F
rom that day on I adored every minute I spent around Robert Mitchum. The epitome of a macho movie star, hard-drinking, drug-taking, and womanizing, he attracted every man on the film to do it with him. After a day of shooting, Mitchum partied until dawn. Coming to the set from an all-nighter, he showered in his trailer and worked all day. While the rest of the guys were vomiting or hungover, he was fresh as a daisy and ready for bear. I knew I could not handle those kinds of nights and did not join his coterie.
Mitch was an extremely generous man, flying in thousands of dollars of food from Chasen's in Hollywood for a Friday night party, picking up the tab for one and all on those binges, and giving expensive gifts to the Mexican women who favored him.
But his greatest gift was his ability to just stand in front of the camera and “be.” He could memorize a full page of dialogue at a glance and play it perfectly in one take. I never saw him flub a line and he was a great mimicâdevastatingly funny about men like David Lean, the director, ruthlessly mocking his preciousness about “the art of cinema,” loving to tell the story of coming up behind Lean while he was looking through the lens during the shoot of
Ryan's Daughter
and sniffing about his head.
“What are you doing, Robert?” Mr. Lean asked.
“There seems to be a terrible odor of cunt about you, David,” Bob said.
And he would often pass by me, tossing off a casual one-liner, as in:
“Get out your pencil, Frank, and take this down. Herewith a list of the ten dullest actors in Hollywood. They are: Gregory Peck.” He whiled away his time spontaneously breaking into song, reading poetry, boozing, puffing, fucking, and sleeping.
I envied Mitch his easygoing, seemingly carefree, rangy masculinity. I was not, nor will I ever be, the kind of man he was. And by not trying, I established a rapport with him that I might not otherwise have had.
I do not presume to understand the reasons he developed a persona that presented to the world a man who cared very little about anything and just indulged his senses. I found him to be a man who, in fact, cared deeply, but chose not to display it. Most likely he found our profession somewhat unmanly. He did not suffer fools and was not unaware of how he was perceived. If you took the time to penetrate the laissez-faire attitude he adopted, he responded with warmth and compassion. Clark Gable had always been my favorite movie star but Mitch was giving him a run for his money. A nonjudgmental dad who seemed to practice tough love. And his no-shit cynical approach to the business of moviemaking was both instructive and delicious to watch.
He had a cool defiance of authority, insisting he return to his trailer to take a leak when it was five miles away from the place we were shooting. Each leak cost the company time and money until they got the message and brought his trailer nearer every setup, but still he took his time.
And further, he refused to wear squib packs, the small plastic bags of fake blood put under your costume to make it look as if you'd been shot.
“Use a fucking double,” he'd say, “I'll be in my trailer,” costing the company more time and money. I never saw him raise his voice, be rude to an underling, or be unprepared.
The word on Robert Mitchum was that he was really a great actor who'd never gotten the right role in which to display his full talent. But I don't think that was the case. He was a great movie star with a singular presence, but personally seemed, in my experience of him, to suffer from an ennui he couldn't overcome. So he polluted himself with drugs and liquor, and relied on his formidable masculine sex appeal and quiet charisma. He was by no means a hack, but a sensitive man with a caring nature who had developed a deadpan delivery and an ability to stay afloat in the studio system.
One day, waiting to finish a ridiculous sequence in which he would fall on me while tied to a stone cross, thereby crushing me to death, I told him how much I liked a small film he'd done called
Going Home
.
“Thanks,” he said. “Great story, good kid, Jan-Michael Vincent. MGM pissed all over it. Dumped it.”
The assistant director came over and said they were ready for us.
“I gotta take a leak,” Mitch said. “I'll be in my trailer for about an hour.” He glanced at me as he got up.
“MGM's producing this turkey too,” he said.
“This piss is gonna cost 'em another million.”
B
eing completely true to the spirit of this book, I should not include Princess Diana. But her death touched my life on a day I will always remember. It forced me to reassess this unfortunate woman and to wish I had in fact been able to meet her.
Up until the tragedy, I had paid very little attention to her. She was not, in my opinion, a great beauty. At certain angles pleasing to look at. Stylish, yes. A good body for clothes. But not a drop-dead stunner like Julie Christie or Lesley-Anne Down. And I was not sympathetic toward her problems, which struck me as fairly typical: spurned wife, insensitive husband, clever mistress. Pure soap opera. But fate intervened, and I had, at last, to take notice.
I sat down in an oversized comfortable chair in the living room of my suite at the Regent Hotel in Berlin where I was finishing a film; the first for the famous
Cirque du Soleil.
It was 2 a.m. and I began to channel-surf. First I saw Diana's image on German television. Then French. Then Italian. And still it did not dawn on me. When I hit CNN, the words “The Princess died at . . .” were the first I heard. I woke my companion, and she came and curled up with me in the same chair as we watched till sunrise. We had been planning to go to London on the weekend to spend time with our friends, the producer Fred Zollo and his wife, Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond franchise, who were planning a possible dinner with Diana and Dodi Fayed. We kept those plans, with the exception, of course, of the promised dinner.
The morning of the funeral, September 6, 1997, we woke at 7 a.m. and from our windows at the Savoy Hotel, saw over the Thames to Big Ben, a rare early morning sight in London: a completely blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. It was going to be a brisk, sunny day. Fred and Barbara were going to watch the coffin move through the streets from the balcony of Barbara's offices on Piccadilly and asked us to join them. We left our hotel at 9 a.m. and began to walk the barren streets.
Most of the cafes were empty, the proprietors staring out the windows at us as we passed by. Few cars. As we walked along Piccadilly, the crowds grew more and more dense. Fred and Barbara were standing on their balcony and waved down to us; we went upstairs and from there we could see people streaming across Green Park toward Constitution Hill.
In an open triangle of road we would be able to see the horse-drawn gun carriage, carrying Diana's body, move by us. A dozen or more people came in, quiet and somber, and on the floor a small five-year-old girl sat coloring pictures in front of the TV. On it we could see the coffin beginning its journey, and we watched as it came closer to our location, then we moved onto the balcony again moments before it passed. There was total and utter silence on the street. In the basement of Barbara's offices was a screening room with some twenty-five seats. Some of us went down there to watch the coffin make its way to Westminster Abbey on the large screen. These are the sights and sounds I remember:
The broken faces of her sons.
The quiet determination of the pallbearers.
Luciano Pavarotti leaning on his children.
Diana's sisters' dignified readings.
The hymns.
The almost unbearable heartbreak of Elton John singing “Candle in the Wind” as those in the screening room wept uncontrollably.
The heroic and passionate speech of her brother, Earl Spencer, in his last noble public moment.
But most of all the sight of the word “Mummy,” written in a young boy's hand on an envelope resting on her coffin as it slowly moved through the streets of London in a human silence so profound that the clip-clop of horses' hooves became the only audible sound.
W
hen it was over, I went outside alone and tried to get as close to that triangle as I could to watch the hearse go by on its journey to Althorp, Diana's country home. My companion wanted no more part of this spectacle and returned to the Savoy. I made my way toward Buckingham Palace, and for the next two hours I was able to experience firsthand this historic day up close and personal. As I walked through Green Park, I stopped at a large tree that had, all around on the ground, messages, drawings, and flowers from a class of children. I picked up one poem, and read its last two lines:
“Now Diana's in heaven with all the good, and Jesus is loving her like he should.”
Once near the palace, I wandered into the crowd and got as close to the flowers laid against the gates as I could. Here are a few of the things I overheard:
“She's dead, love. We've got to get used to it.”
“Y
ou know, an enterprising bloke could gather up all these flowers, sell them, and be a millionaire overnight.”
“I
like the Queen.”
“So do I, but she's got nothing to do with my life.”
A
large woman had gathered around her a crowd of some thirty people, her King Charles spaniel seated in a baby carriage: “A complete stranger loaned me this,” she said to the crowd as she picked up the dog and posed for photographs. Everywhere were black plastic bags blown against the barricades, photographs and posters of Diana, discarded blankets and coats, bottles, newspapers, fast food boxes. I stopped to listen to two young girls who were sitting on the ground holding a book and singing “Amazing Grace.” One had shaved her head on both sides, her punk top dyed a bright red. The other in a bedsheet-white pageboy. When they finished, a few people applauded as they smiled and one said to the other, “Pretty good, love.”
Approaching Admiralty Arch, I saw four stepladders facing toward the palace, each with a professional photographer perched on top taking photos. Behind each ladder, there was a short line of more photographers waiting their turn. Walking through Admiralty Arch, back toward Trafalgar Square, up the Strand toward our hotel, I noticed the pubs beginning to fill, the shops opening, and people speaking in normal tones again. Almost everyone was holding a camera.
Once back at the Savoy, sitting in the window seat of our River Suite, I thought that but for the heavy foot of a driver named Henri Paul and a pack of wild animals in pursuit of her, she'd be alive on this lovely day. And I thought of the expression on her face as she came out and reentered the Ritz Hotel in Paris before going to its back door and stepping into her waiting coffin. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes as she moved in and out of swinging doors, turned quickly this way and that, seemingly like a blind person, without a stick or a guide dog, being steered in someone else's direction.
D
iana had lost not only her virginity to an English prince but her innocence, her anonymity, and her way. Now, a thirty-six-year-old divorced woman, made unhappy by an insensitive husband in love with someone else, she was grasping at an ambitious playboy, making a run for her life, and about to lose it.
