By Harvey
Chartrand
Frank Langella played an aging writer in Starting Out in the Evening (2007). Who
would have figured this for typecasting?
In his superb memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them (HarperCollins),
Langella reveals that he is an incomparable memoirist and storyteller,
recalling his encounters with scores of luminaries from the world of
entertainment in a career spanning half a century. All of these luminaries are deceased and the
cast of characters is listed “by order of disappearanceâ€. Just as well, as many
of the revelations are quite shocking.
Langella must be the most sociable and congenial actor
on the planet, as the busyness of his social and professional lives and the breadth
and depth of his friendships, romantic liaisons and acquaintances are very impressive
indeed. He met Marilyn Monroe in 1953. She stepped out of a limousine and said “hiâ€
to the adolescent from Bayonne, New Jersey. In 1962, Langella, struggling for a
toehold on Broadway, carried a dead drunk Montgomery Clift to his nearby
townhouse several times. “He never spoke a word to me. Never even knew my
name,†Langella recalls.
He knew Anthony Perkins in the late fifties when the
future Norman Bates was the king of Broadway, and decades later met him in the
parking lot of a grocery store in L.A., shortly before his death.
“I turned and saw what looked to me like a ghostly
apparition, a paper-thin, wide-eyed, sallow-faced, walking cadaver. (…) He did not speak. (…) It was a terrifying
sight. Clearly dying and clearly desperate, he seemed disoriented and lost.
Only his familiar crooked grin gave me the sense he knew who he was. (…)
Staring through my rearview mirror at him wandering around in the grass and
weeds, I remembered when the world was his oyster and it seemed nothing could
stand in his way; a book with such a beautiful cover on whose pages were most
likely written crippling and indelible words of shame and guilt.â€
Several of Langella’s memoirs deal with the ravages of
time on the careers of actors and actresses who had been to the top of their
profession and smelled its rarefied air. In 1976, Langella co-starred with
Cameron Mitchell “in a ghastly television series entitled Swiss Family Robinson.†By then, the once handsome Mitchell was “fifty-eight,
a fat, jowly mess, covering his sad decline with an over-the-top wisecracking
demeanor; its most heartbreaking manifestation its constancy.†The wardrobe lady
finds an old Napoleonic-era jacket with Mitchell’s name on it, probably the one
he wore in Desirée, a 1954 film he
did with Marlon Brando. Mitchell does “a little yo ho yo ho strut†in the jacket that is now two sizes too small
for him, “like a vaudeville clown getting ready to throw a pie.†Pathetic.
Langella is unusually frank about his relationships
with Rita Hayworth (20 years his senior, her memory failing) and an aging
Elizabeth Taylor, whom he gently spurns, knowing that he could not be part of “her
indiscriminate search for the one thing she could not and would never have:
Enough!â€
Langella has serious regrets about lost opportunities: blowing
a possible relationship with Dinah Shore; treating an older Deborah Kerr
callously as they co-starred in Edward Albee’s play Seascape on Broadway in 1974… and then trying to meet with her 30
years later to apologize; turning down a role in John Frankenheimer’s The Horsemen in order to star in Mel
Brooks’ flop The Twelve Chairs, which
led to an angry rebuke by Frankenheimer, who never asked for Langella again.
Langella befriended Alan Bates during the Broadway run of
Ivan Turgenev’s play Fortune’s Fool
and they remained very close friends until Bates’ death in 2003. Langella also
expresses admiration for Tony Curtis: “(…) apart from the absurdity of his
desperate attempts to look cool, hip and young, I found him always to be
charming, instantly connected, and very funny. He was, as well, ruthlessly
honest when he didn’t like someone or something. A no-shit guy who had taken a
lot of abuse, often challengingly bringing it upon himself.â€
As for Paul Newman, who tried to befriend Langella, the
memoirist writes: “He was a great audience, a true lover of acting and actors,
and wanted, I believe, to be thought of as a great actor. He wasn’t. But he
gave everything he had to every role. As his movie star days faded and turned
mostly to stage and television projects, his limitations became more apparent.
As indeed, they were in life. After dirty-sexy jokes, shop talk, cars, or
politics were exhausted, Paul was a pretty dull companion. Never rude or
unkind, just dull.†However, Langella ends his chapter on Newman with a
description of his final heartbreaking encounter with the actor famed for his
baby-blues when he is stricken with cancer.†As I read this passage, I was so
moved that tears welled in my eyes.
Dropped
Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them is so damned
interesting and well written that it should be savoured, but that is almost
impossible. I dashed through the book in one sitting and will read it again
just to study Langella’s literary artistry. My only quibble is that Langella
doesn’t mention Kate Nelligan, his ravishing leading lady in John Badham’s 1979
Dracula.
Other stars and entertainers profiled by Langella
include Billie Burke, Noel Coward, Lee Strasberg (whom Langella treated with
contempt), Celia Johnson, Dolores del Rio, James Mason, Richard Burton (a thundering
bore), Yul Brynner, Elsa Lanchester, Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Rex
Harrison (a dreadful man), Coral Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, Gilbert Roland,
Jessica Tandy, Raúl Juliá, Ida Lupino, Jo Van Fleet (who ended her days as a
bag lady), Robert Mitchum, Roddy McDowall, Oliver Reed, George C. Scott
(terminally sad), Loretta Young, Roger Vadim, John Gielgud, Anthony Quinn, Hume
Cronyn, Elia Kazan (“talent such as his doesn’t give you rights†to become “a
serial fucker of women’s bodies and men’s mindsâ€) , Arthur Miller, Anne
Bancroft (terminally miserable despite all her gifts), Maureen Stapleton,
Yvonne De Carlo, Charlton Heston, Richardo Montalban, Jill Clayburgh and
Susannah York.
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