Dropped Names (21 page)

“No.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm playing the lead in a new off-Broadway show and it's a hit. I got my Equity card, and I'm getting fifty dollars a week.”

“We'd love to have you back, kid,” he said and hung up.

T
hose were the last words I spoke with Elia Kazan for over thirty years, until one night in a Los Angeles restaurant, I felt someone staring hard at me from across the room. I looked over, but from that distance I could not recognize him. My dinner companion said:

“Geez, it's Kazan.”

I got up and walked toward his table.

“Hello, Gadge,” I said and embraced him.

He beamed, took my face in his hands, kissed it, poked his finger into my chest, and said, “Frankie, my boy, you did it without me.” He was right. But he had also been right thirty years earlier. I had been closed up tight as a drum and could have benefited from exposure to his extraordinary gifts, but at a price I was not, at the time, ready or prepared to pay.

I have always felt that talent such as his doesn't give you rights. Gadge was a serial fucker of women's bodies and men's minds, and used his profound perceptions about the human condition as cruel grist for his own ambitious mill. And, worse, he deserted his friends by ratting on them to the House Un-American Activities Committee in order to save his own professional skin.

In 1999, when he was awarded an honorary Oscar, I was sitting in the front row at the ceremony. His speech was rambling, embarrassing, and out of touch. A man close to the end, who left us some great work and masterminded some extraordinary performances from some extraordinary actors.

During his standing ovation, listening to the thunderous applause being given to a singular force in my profession and a seminal figure in my life, I nevertheless remained in my seat with my hands folded.

ALAN BATES

T
he last words I spoke to Alan Bates onstage at the Music Box Theatre in the play
Fortune's Fool
during the 2002 Broadway season were “Give my regards to Vietrovo.” They were in reference to a place his character had longed to be all his life; an estate triumphantly returned to him in the play's final moments. I said the words to his back as I watched him slowly moving into the wings, destined to spend his last days in his beloved fictional home. Alan is now buried on his beloved land in Derbyshire, England. “My Vietrovo,” he would say.

He had been seriously ill during the run of our play. Pains in his legs, a gnawing ache in his stomach, and his longtime battle with diabetes occupied a fair amount of his time. Visits to my family doctor confirmed something ominous was brewing, but Alan refused exploratory tests. “I'll deal with it when I get home,” he said, soldiering on, never missing a performance.

After we closed he faced hip surgery, and recovered, but ultimately surrendered to the pancreatic cancer that took him less than a year after being knighted by the Queen and winning a Tony for his consummate performance in our play.

Alan loved to act. Just as he loved all the other temporary pleasures: food, liquor, sex, gossip, fame, and spending money on expensive clothes. He bought them almost daily. One of our rituals during the play's run consisted of my plopping down on the couch in his dressing room at the half hour call and reviewing our day. Several nights a week Alan modeled the latest suit jacket, coat, or sweater he'd purchased, often three or more of each on that day's spree.

“Look, Frankie,” he'd say as he held up one of a half dozen silk shirts. “Extravagant, I know, but I'll have them for life.”

“How long do you expect to live?” I joked.

H
e could not possibly have worn them out in the short time left to him, but he did finally wear out a fragile constitution beaten down by a broken heart. He'd lost a nineteen-year-old twin son, Tristan, in 1990 to an accidental overdose and soon after, the boy's mother to her grief. Then came the diabetes. “I think the shock brought it on,” he'd say.

His surviving son, Benedick, in the play with us, was the tall tree on which he leaned. Ben and his wife, Claudia, presented Alan with a granddaughter, Sofia, in 2003. Another child was due to arrive in early 2004, close to what would have been his seventieth birthday. Children who will never know their brilliantly gifted grandfather.

They will be told that he was a great actor and it will be the truth. Alan was the real thing.

To be onstage with him was exceptionally thrilling, challenging, and now forever poignant in my memory. His technical skills were superb, but one expects that in a British actor, particularly of his generation. More dazzling was the humanity, intelligence, and humor he brought to his work, and, more honorable still, his deep respect for audiences. There was no such thing as a “saved” performance. We played full out every night. At the end of Act 1 we left the stage together, loosening our ties, removing our vests, and climbing the back stairs to our dressing rooms. We would review the act, clock what worked, try to calculate where we might have gone too far or let down.

One early preview, I asked Alan if my character, written as an eighteenth-century fop, might be carrying on a dalliance with his constant companion, a fellow named Little Fish.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “I think perhaps he says to himself, ‘
Well we've got twenty minutes
.' ”

Laughter is the salve that eases the pain of strenuous parts in long runs, and Alan's capacity for it was infectious. He actually rocked with it, his face turning beet red, his eyes welling with tears. Many nights we collapsed on the stairs in hysterics over a missed cue or fallen prop. Not to mention the occasional bodily emission onstage, usually Alan's. The halls would echo with his howls of “Oh, dear me! What did I eat?”

We sometimes came close to losing it onstage as well—like kids in church with giggles threatening to erupt at any second. But they never did. It was Alan's restraint that kept us in tow.

He often came to my Upper West Side apartment on our free Monday nights and I'd cook him an Italian meal as he happily watched the telly. And at least four nights a week we dined together after our performance, often joined by colleagues in other shows. We both loved the camaraderie and delicious rivalry that goes on among actors. Alan particularly liked to tell the different ways actors can put each other down, and I would urge him to repeat my favorite stories to a new table of fresh blood. Two of the best:

A
friend of his came backstage after seeing him in an Ibsen play and said:

“Bravo, dear. Bravo. I must say, you took it at such a clip. Very impressive. Nothing to do with Ibsen, of course.”

O
r this:

“Alan, sweetie, my host got us tickets in the last row, so we had a bit of difficulty hearing you in the first act. Fortunately there were plenty of empty seats after intermission and we were able to move closer.”

W
e couldn't wait to review the things said to us after a show. One night I came in to see him and said:

“Guess what Madam Movie Star said?”

“Tell me instantly.”

“You two look like you're having so much fun up there—too much fun.”

“Silly cow,” he said. “Doesn't she know how much work it takes to look like you're having fun?”

One night, Lauren Bacall and Kirk Douglas graced us with their eminence.

“Come on,” Kirk said in the fractured speech he suffered as the result of a stroke, “we're taking you to Orso's.”

Walking slowly behind them on Eighth Avenue, I asked Alan, “Did they say anything to you?”

“No. Not a word, dear. Oh, I know! During dinner, I'll say something nice about you and you do the same about me. They're bound to join in.”

So for two hours, during war stories from Kirk about movies he'd made in the 1950s Alan and I gently mentioned each other's performances hoping for a morsel of praise from these two legends. Nothing! Kirk waxed rhapsodic about the old days and Betty ate in silence, occasionally wiping his mouth and once in while asking him to repeat something, whereupon he would devilishly turn to her and say: “Whassa madder, Beddy, don't you unnerstand Anglish?”

Alan and I began to find their total lack of interest in mentioning either the show or our performances very funny. He would begin to kick me under that table but I avoided looking directly into his eyes. Finally, as we were getting up to leave, Betty said in her deepest baritone:

“Did you take this thing on the road first?”

“Oh yes” said Alan. “You see, our director, Arthur Penn . . .”

“Oh, Arthur directed this?” she said.

“Yes,” said Alan. “He felt the play needed a bit of trimming so we took it to Stamford to shorten it. It was a bit longer than the show you saw.”

Betty took an internal pause, then looked at both of us and said incredulously:

“Longer?”

We managed to get them into their car and on their way before collapsing on the stairs next to Orso in helpless laughter. Betty's one-word review became Alan's gag for the rest of the run. Every once in a while he would pass by me and in a deep disdainful basso he'd whisper the word:
“Longer?”

H
is death has denied us all that wicked sense of humor and me the fun of doing
Fortune's Fool
with him in London as we had planned. Friendships are difficult to make and sustain later in life, but we forged one as colleagues and brothers.

We kept in close contact after the play closed, talking on the phone about our lives and the people or performances we'd just seen. One night he called from London and said, “I've had the tests, dear. It's the Big C.”

We said all the things you say at such a moment and ended the conversation with his ideas for the London production. I made extra efforts to call him from then on, but all too soon our conversations began to center on tracking his disease.

A few months before he died, I spent a week with him at his London house, sitting and talking in his garden, walking to the local market to collect groceries, and going every night to the theatre. Afterward we went to The Ivy or Sheeky's, favorite theatrical haunts, with Joanna Pettet, his companion, and Mike Poulton, our friend and adapter of
Fortune's Fool
. Alan was bald from the “cups of chemo,” as he called them, and the radiation treatments, but jolly and gregarious as he table-hopped showing off his cue ball.

The flu felled me twenty-four hours before my planned trip to see him just before Christmas in 2003, but I rescheduled it for early January and we spoke on the phone almost daily up until five days before he died. In our last conversation, I asked if there was anything I could bring him. He answered:

“Just your presence, dear, and a few good laughs. Oh, I want you to see me in my hospital frock. Pale green—open at the rear. Mind your cold. See you in January.”

A
t 5 a.m. on Sunday, December 28, Mike Poulton rang to say that Alan, who had been knighted Sir Alan only a scant twelve months before, was gone.

But never will he be so in my fondest memories. I will be able to see him again and again, pounding the table at dinner in helpless laughter, washing the dishes in my New York apartment while doing an hilarious Dame Edna impression, careening around the stage in transcendent drunken splendor, preening in his dressing room mirror saying, “I'm still dishy, aren't I?” or wickedly whispering Bacall's “Longer?”

I will feel him slipping his arm in mine as we head toward Orso's restaurant, his leg giving him pain about which he never complained. I'll watch him jab a needle of insulin into his belly at a table in Joe Allen's after demolishing a bowl full of vanilla ice cream topped off with a giant chocolate chip cookie. I will hear his choirboy giggles, see the way he looked at and adored his son Ben, admire his supreme kindness to fans, and recall his humble courage under fire.

This, too, I will recall: We were walking toward the stage on the afternoon of our first preview in Stamford, Connecticut. Arthur had called us to rehearse our curtain calls. Alan stopped me in the dark of the wings and said:

“Frankie, they're going to adore you in this.”

“You, too,” I said.

“Let's not find out which of us they adore more.”

So we took our bow together. And every night as we appeared in the upstage doorway moving toward the audience's applause, one of us would whisper to the other as we bowed low: “They just adore me tonight.”

H
ad Alan allowed himself the final call he so much deserved, he would have known how much they did adore him. He was a gentle, loving man whose humor, grace, kindness, and humanity constantly humbled me. To watch him backstage as he struggled to his place before we took our curtain call together, clearly in pain and exhausted, then gather himself, smile at me across the way, and turn to face the audience, was a lesson in gallantry I carry with me still. No matter what, Alan was going to go on, not because the show must, but because his personal sense of integrity required it.

I'd give anything to have twenty minutes with him again.