James Grissom

Tennessee Williams: Women Who Influenced THE GLASS MENAGERIE

2023-05-25T01:20:00.002-04:00

I’m amused when I’m sent things that purport to analyze and explain my plays, and they are almost always centered on theatrical antecedents. It is assumed, by a number of smart people, that Brecht was my primary influence in the writing of Menagerie. I was more influenced by Clarence Brown than by Brecht, but this type of analysis gives people something to do. I think this scholarly research is a variant on my mother, my sister, and me revising movies in the house and the backyard. I told this to Gore [Vidal] and he said “Yes, but you and your mother were only disturbing the squirrels, some nosy neighbors, and your psyche. Academics disturb everything.”

Do you agree?

I don’t think about it.

Miriam Hopkins

What are some of the films that influenced Menagerie?

Well, Amanda is certainly a repository of mannerisms and methods belonging to my mother—Edwina—but I was thinking of a number of women—actresses—when I cobbled her together. There is a great deal of Miriam Hopkins in Amanda, and it troubles me that so many people are no longer aware of her. If they know her at all, it is as the butt of many jokes made at her expense by Bette Davis and her fans, but Miriam was a remarkable actress and a great character, wild and funny and smart. She was very Southern, in that she was determined to always be pretty and useful and funny and necessary. I knew a lot of women who were like Miriam Hopkins or wanted very much to be Miriam Hopkins when I was growing up. She burned brightly and quickly; she was afraid she might miss things, so she flitted about. I spent a number of years obsessed with Miriam Hopkins. I carried her in my heart and in my memory. I would see her on streets and imagine her in particular situations. She occupied, for brief moments of time, the forms of Blanche and Amanda and then became what became Lady Torrance. I loved her. Difficult? I guess so. Not with me. She was every Southern divinity you could imagine. Smart and funny and elegant, and I kept looking for her in Joanne [Woodward], and Carrie Nye and Diane Ladd, but there was no one like her. No one. I will hear nothing bad of Miriam Hopkins. So Miriam got caught up in the recipe that is Amanda. I was also thinking of a particular quickness—a changing of the masks—that one saw in the work of Ruth Chatterton. Chatterton could very quickly alter her face to convey a series of emotions, and you could chart the survival of the women she was playing. It was like a shuffling of psychic cards across her face. Wonderful, wonderful actress. When she began to work in talking pictures, she was able to do the same thing with her voice—shifting, altering, hiding, flaunting. I needed some of that for Amanda, particularly when she is speaking to anyone outside of the hive she shares with Tom and Laura. There’s Fay Bainter in Amanda—and Fay toured quite successfully in Menagerie, perhaps unknowingly stepping into some of her own skin. But I took these various women and I placed them on a solid foundation from which they could operate, and that was Ida Lupino in a film called The Hard Way, which bears very little resemblance to Menagerie, but Lupino plays a scrappy, tough, manipulative woman who will do anything to get her kid sister into better situations—and to find for herself an identity and an annuity. I remember the grimy town and the grimy home in which the characters lived, and I began to imagine the oilcloth and soiled damask of the tenement in St. Louis in which Amanda would navigate and dream and plan and pine. So it was The Hard Way that I slipped beneath these women—a plate upon which to serve them up, so to speak.

Ruth Chatterton

Fay Bainter

Ida Lupino in The Hard Way (1943)

Michael Learned: Shattering

2023-05-20T17:31:00.006-04:00

Michael Learned. Photo courtesy of Harlan Boll.

I have had only one personal encounter with actress Michael Learned. In 1995 my friend Marian Seldes and press agent Sam Rudy invited me to a run-through of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, which was being held in a large rehearsal space and in preparation for a tour and a Los Angeles production.

Marian had begun her relationship with the play in the role of “B,” a woman she called a “sour mendicant,” who hunched and lurked and sneered at Myra Carter’s “A,” an imperious, racist woman of wealth who employed and insulted her. Christina Rouner had assumed the role of “C,” a young woman sent to the home of “A” to determine finances and history, and to be queried by the two older women. Rouner had studied at Juilliard under Marian’s watchful eye, and Marian told me that “I met this glorious pearl—look at her—and found a genius within. She can surprise so easily with her acting. May her beauty open doors, not close them.”

I had seen Three Tall Women five times—first at the Vineyard, then at the Promenade. Myra Carter enjoyed and deserved great acclaim for her performance as “A,” but she was exhausted by the woman she played. “I love Myra,” Marian told me, “but I dislike her bitterness. I’ve told her this. This is not unknown to her. I spent so much time shutting out her negativity.” Marian was now assuming the starring role once played by Carter, and it terrified her. “These are huge shoes to fill,” she had told me, “but I would never turn down this chance.”

Michael Learned was now “B.”

The run-through was wonderful. I soon forgot I was in a sunny loft-like space, and could see these women in the ornate, sterile bedroom of the old woman. In a corner of the space sat Michael Learned’s luggage. Marian later told me that she had stepped off a plane and into performance.

Like so many people, my relationship with Michael Learned began with her work as Olivia on the CBS television series “The Waltons.” I was ten years old when it premiered, and it was deemed “appropriate” for me by my parents. I loved the program then, and my mother had teased me for saying that Learned did so much while doing so little. Even though Learned earned three Emmy Awards for her role, she was never—at least to my young eyes—caught acting. I could see Ellen Corby and Will Geer (excellent, yes) at work, applying adjectives to their actions. I never saw this with Learned. She was what a number of directors would call a listening actress: She lived in the scenes and responded, primarily with her eyes, but sometimes movement about the mouth, to everything and everyone. Both Mike Nichols and Tennessee Williams would tell me that this was their ideal among actresses, and they both wondered why the British gave us this more often than American actresses. “Bette Davis always layers her work,” Nichols told me. “I love her, but she isn’t merely enraged or mean: She acts mean and enraged. She enlarges her eyes. She shakes. She transmits an emotion, rather than merely experiencing it.”

Michael Learned experiences right in front of us.

A friend of mine who grew up in Alameda, California, told me about seeing Michael Learned in a San Francisco production of Miss Margarida’s Way, Roberto Athayde’s one-woman play about a schoolteacher who berates her class and the audience, and which is seen as representative of authoritarian power. Estelle Parsons earned praise taking on this part in New York (at least twice), and my friend spoke of his shock and admiration at seeing Learned, whom he knew as so lovely and poised and discrete on “The Waltons” ripping into the savagery of the part. “She was scary,” he told me, “and so, so sexy. She showed us the power of the dictator, the person who held you captive behind a locked door.”

Joanne Camp, Linda Lavin, and Michael Learned in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig. (Martha Swope)

Michael Learned as Sara in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig. (Martha Swope)

I remember watching Learned in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, so many icy currents of water coursing through her, slowly melting as love and affection and memory bring her a warmth that I felt surprised her character and which overwhelmed her audience. It was a transformative performance, but quiet, gentle: Learned isn’t given to big, intrusive scenes. Her character altered before our eyes, and I will always remember seeing her, as if she were posing for a portrait, beautifully dressed, composed, sitting on a sofa, lost in thought that we could all see troubled and challenged and liberated her. I remember telling Mike Nichols I had seen Learned in the play three times, and Nichols said he, too, had seen it multiple times. “I went to study Dan Sullivan [the play’s director], and I did, but I slipped into study of Michael Learned.” In a perfect world, I said, we would see Michael Learned and Jane Alexander (who had originated the role) in repertory, seeing both actresses as they examined the soul of this woman. “That is a perfect world,” Nichols. “Keep dreaming it.”

Watching Learned in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” for Netflix, I could see all that I have loved about her work, distilled into a performance that was horrifying in its way, because we were seeing an emotional inquiry being forcibly conducted on an intensely private and decent woman. The grandmother of a serial killer, Learned gave us—clearly and primarily—a devoted grandmother ready to offer love and shelter to this boy. Learned’s emotions as Catherine Dahmer were as tidy and perfectly displayed as her kitchen, her utensils on the tray where her dinners were served. Catherine Dahmer persists in living, in going to church, in being a good mother and grandmother, and both her decency and her ultimate mental decline prevent her from fully understanding what Jeffrey is doing, has done. I felt happy for her that her faculties might never have allowed her to know what she was loving and hosting in her home.

I think it is a shattering performance.

I clearly love Michael Learned, the actress, but I would like to close with a story about Michael Learned, the woman. At the conclusion of the rehearsal for Three Tall Women, I was able to sit with her, Marian, and Ms. Rouner. At the time I was in discussions with Ellis Rabb about writing a book, and a chapter would have been about William Ball, a director long affiliated with ACT in San Francisco, and an important person in the life and career of Learned. Ball had recently died, but I was unaware that it was a suicide. Very quietly, and with emotion, Learned said that Ball had put some classical music on his Walkman, placed the earphones around his head, and then placed a plastic bag over his head, and---she paused, eyes welling—drifted off. Marian’s hands went to her mouth in shock. Rouner asked if Ball’s health had been a factor. No, Learned stated, her friend was facing some struggles, financial, and felt he couldn’t ask for help. I remember what Learned then said. “I can’t bear that he didn’t think he could come to me,” she said. “To so many people. I vowed then to let people know their worth.”

The following day Marian and I were speaking, and she said “How lucky am I? Working with this giant of a woman! So talented and kind and giving. I always want and expect the best, and here I have it again. Wasn’t she wonderful? Wasn’t that incredible what she said? I have to let her always know how valuable and worthy she is to me.”

Watch Michael Learned act. Watch how her characters transform. In “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” the horror of what we are experiencing is magnified by the image of Learned’s Catherine being in the orbit of evil, of moving ahead, of operating a faith that will soon fail her, or which might blessedly rob of her of all understanding.

Bravo, Ms. Learned.

Evan Peters and Michael Learned in "Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story." (Netflix)

Kim Stanley: Acting Cannot Be Taught

2022-04-24T11:13:00.002-04:00

Interview with Kim Stanley conducted by James Grissom/1992/Los Angeles

"I'm going to stop you right there, because I do not teach acting. Acting cannot be taught, and anyone who tells you that it can is a charlatan. You are either born with the talent to act or you are not. A teacher, a guide, a coach can only enhance what you've been given, and this is done primarily through showing the actor where to look--at books, at theatre, at films, at art, at people, at life all around. Expand their minds and hearts. You can give them confidence by the foundation you build beneath their feet, and then you can hold those feet to the fire by demanding that they be truthful--in life and in any scenes they do before a class.

"There is so much out there to learn and to ingest, and we can share our experience of a book or a painting or a performance by incorporating into our roles what we saw and felt. We have to think and be big. A class is where you dare to take on parts you know are beyond you: Shakespeare, Shaw, Congreve, Sheridan, Ibsen. I tell the shy girl who has talent she can't even find or touch within her to become Mary Tyrone [in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night], and something is awakened within her. She realizes she can be so many people. If you don't make your students stumble toward greatness, then you really have no business calling yourself a teacher. Acting class is not therapy. Acting class is not affirmation time. There are twelve-step programs to let you know you're loved and encircled. Acting class is to let you know that time is running out on all the beauty in the world, and you are dispatching those students to harvest and husband it and take it to the world.

"But you have to have talent. No matter how much love or money you throw at me, if you weren't born with the gift, as far as I can see, you do not belong in a class or on a stage. Your passion for the theatre can take you to other places within the theatre, but the stage is holy, and lowered standards kill it."

Marian Seldes: Envy, Anger, Spite

2022-04-21T08:48:00.002-04:00

Interview with James Grissom/2006

"A student comes to me--or a young person who needs help--and I don't want to tell them about some of the things that await them. A gifted person comes to me, and I am inspired by all they have; their unique ability to analyze and share things--and then the day comes when fear strikes them, and it almost always surfaces as envy, anger, spite.

"I have always been more afraid of anger than I have of people on the street who might hurt me. People always told me to walk closer to the street, because doorways and alleys might hide people who would hurt or rob me. I'm more frightened of the dark alleys in our minds, where actions are waiting to jump out and force us to corrupt who we are.

"I found myself telling students that no one--no one at all--can take what is yours. You think a part was owed to you, belonged to you, and then it goes to another, and I have seen years of rage build up over this so-called slight. It is not a slight: It is a choice. It has nothing to do with your worth or your future. I know this. I fell apart many times until I got myself together over this. There are choices that await and they will favor you, but I don't think they can find you and rest upon you if you harbor this feeling that you are owed. Choices want to rest on the person or the place that will best serve them.

"Look, I don't care any longer that people think I'm odd. Loony. I hear what they say. I see their faces. I overheard someone--a press agent--say that I was from some other planet. I wanted to invite him to come spend some time on my planet, where I loved and respected him. Why did he feel he had to say that? On that same day, I overheard him sniping about this person or that person. He was rich with criticism, and I realized that I was alien to him. His thinking is alien to me. I don't understand it. We need to draw people toward and around us, not push them away.

"No one can really hurt you as deeply and as frequently as they hurt themselves. I remember when someone I thought was a friend said something so cruel to me, but I now know that the statement was not about me, and if I think of the action of this person as a need they have to feel better, to release some acid in their system, I don't feel hurt for anyone but them.

"Success depends so much on what you can and will ignore. Cruel and untrue things are said about all of us at some point. You know, and I know, what the truth is. We now know what their truth is as well: They hurt, and they need to bring someone to their planet of hurt and have a little company.

"I try very hard--as a discipline--to be kind and open, but I'm going to say this in a way you will not expect from me: I am not going near their shitty planet."

Johanna Day: Misery Is Optional

2022-04-15T20:00:00.009-04:00

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.
―Katherine Mansfield

PART ONE

Johanna Day, the actress, is the youngest of nine children, was born with a caul covering her face, and is frequently followed by snakes. These aspects of her biography are sometimes credited with giving her special powers: She can diagnose illness and is very good at treating people of both mental and physical maladies, her gift for friendship is phenomenal, and she can overlook the odious with admirable rapidity. A lot of Day's positivity she credits to her mother, who had hanging in her kitchen a sign that read "Misery is Optional." Day's mother, Eileen, was close to Johanna, her youngest, and knew about and supported her dreams. Diagnosed with cancer during a peak in her daughter's career--the Broadway run of "Proof"--her mother remained as active as she could, involved in the lives of all of her children, and getting to Chicago less than two weeks before her death to see Johanna in a play. "I remember her looking at her legs, and saying, 'Look how skinny they are,' and then she was gone." When my own mother died recently, the person offering the greatest comfort to me was Johanna Day. (Full disclosure: Johanna and I are friends, but we have issues. I often think she is far too gullible and forgiving, and she occasionally points out that I’m a corrosive asshole. Both of us are correct.)

Johanna Day, early in life, with an early fan.

Johanna and Eileen Day, 2003.

Day is very tall, has flaming red hair, aqua eyes. She makes an impression. More to the point, Day is the sort of actress who has done “all the right things” in her career, by which I mean that she has been doing good plays with talented people and being consistently excellent. Johanna Day has not self-produced plays through Indiegogo and performed in basements or living rooms; she has not been the leading lady of a Folding Chair Classical Theatre, which, to the bewilderment of many, is now considered legitimate by some. She does not promote herself constantly on social media, giving the world wishful-thinking press releases. Instead, Day has appeared in the original casts of three plays that ultimately received the Pulitzer Prize: Paula Vogel’s "How I Learned to Drive," David Auburn’s "Proof," and Lynn Nottage’s "Sweat." (It used to be said that playwrights coveting the Pulitzer Prize should be sure to cast Day. The caul or the snakes attract glittering prizes.) The list of playwrights whose plays she has graced include Craig Lucas, Edward Albee, David Adjmi, Theresa Rebeck, Lanford Wilson, Tracy Letts, Diana Son, David Lindsay-Abaire, Yasmina Reza, Wendy Wasserstein, Stephen Belber, and Will Eno. Day is much loved by her peers: She is easy and fun to work with; she lifts every situation in which she is found. Mary-Louise Parker says of her that “there is no one better to be in a rehearsal room with, on a stage, backstage, in the wings, in the greenroom—anywhere, even near a theater.” Eric Stoltz, the actor, who confesses to a twenty-year crush on Day, and who now produces and directs, remembers working with her on “Madam Secretary”: “She wasn't a regular on that show, but we all wished that she was. Whenever she came to us, there was a great deal of laughter in the hallways, stories to tell and catching up to do.”

Many of us wonder why such a resume and such a reputation hasn’t led to greater work for Day. She worries about work and money; dreams of snagging a role on episodic television, and, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, depressed and repeatedly steamed about hoisting a cumbrous folding screen out of a closet and doing self-tapes in closets and corners, with curious pets and neighbors, Day considered becoming a nurse. She had traveled to Virginia to help care for a dying sister, and realized that life was getting ridiculous. “I’m not going to leave the business, such as it is,” she told me, “but I need to make a living, and I’m good at nursing, like I am at acting, but I need some damned money.”

Johanna Day, in Virginia, 2020.

PART TWO

Day is now in a revival of Paula Vogel’s "How I Learned to Drive," making its Broadway debut at Manhattan Theatre Club, and she is again taking the multiple roles assigned to what is called the Female Greek Chorus, a part she originated twenty-five years ago, first at the Vineyard, and then at the late and lamented Century Center. “I am quite happy,” Day says. “Actually, I am very, very happy, and it's like a dream to be back with all these people who mean so much to me.”

Manhattan Theater Club has reassembled the original primary players of Vogel's play: Director Mark Brokaw, a man Day loves; David Morse, an actor who perpetually impresses her; and Mary-Louise Parker, who is “like a sister to me. I often feel that I was put on this planet to make Mary-Louise laugh; to keep her cheerful. She teaches me how to act. Outside of someone like Gena Rowlands, whom I worship, I can’t think of another actress who is always so real, so determined to get the real heart of a character and a play. This play, at this time, is a gift, a blessing,” and Day confesses that every night she stands offstage, waiting for the lights to dim and the play to begin, and gives thanks for where she is, although this reverie is often interrupted by jokes and embraces from Parker. Their latest inspirational tactic is to utilize a line from the 1980 film Ordinary People, and they emphatically exult "Let's have the best Christmas ever!" And on they go. Gratitude and good will is all around. Paula Vogel says that “Johanna is a gift to playwrights. So many of us have been aided by her vulnerability and visibility on stage: she illuminates the characters she plays from within. And I feel that, if she has a difficulty with a moment or a line in a first draft, it’s probably the script. I have been blessed to work with her.”

Johanna Day, Mary-Louise Parker, Alyssa May Gold, and Chris Myers in Paula Vogel's HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE, at the Manhattan Theater Club.

Day and Parker are a sort of intellectual vaudeville act, sharp, funny, mordant. The two are committed to each other and to sleep: naps are a requirement, and at the Vineyard, in the 1997 premiere of "How I Learned to Drive," they shared a dressing room, utilizing the single sleeping device provided, feet to face, surrounded by signs warning of rats, with the admonition that bags and purses should be kept off the floor. “Great play, shitty dressing rooms,” Day remembers, and adds that sleeping like that, protecting each other and their belongings, made them a duo--as actresses, friends, and painters, with the two scheduling painting times to create their works, all the while smoking, when you could do such a thing inside a building.

David Morse once poked his head in their dressing room and quipped that the work made him think that two children--albeit smoking versions--were doing the work. Parker and Day glared at him and continued, ultimately putting together a curated exhibit of their work, taking on the personalities of Valentine La Tart and Cassandra Macintosh, and a friend and actress from that first production, Kerry O’Malley, starred in a videotape providing commentary on the paintings, assuming the waspish character of an art critic. “Those tapes exist somewhere,” Day says, “and they are priceless. I pray someone finds them.”

Mary-Louise Parker does not just say that she loves Day--she has proven it in various ways over the years, including the time, in the summer of 2020, when she arrived with a big bag of groceries for her friend. “Isn’t that great?” Day asked me. “Someone, someone, doesn’t want me to go hungry. Well, a few probably do, but Mary-Louise got in a car and came to my door and told me to eat.”

When you ask Parker, with whom Day also appeared in "Proof," to say something about their times together, she responds quickly and voluminously: “Where do I start? I have spent more time on stage with Johanna than any other actor.

“She is that rare thing, a true stage animal,” Parker continues. “There aren’t many, and no one like her. She can break hearts in the last row of the balcony and can make even the most reluctant theatergoer choke with laughter. Johanna overflows with authenticity. Her work is truthful and generous, just like she is. She can give me chills just by the timber of her voice, stop my breath with the tiniest gesture. I can promise you also that no one has ever made me laugh harder in my life.”

Johanna Day and Mary-Louise Parker in David Auburn's PROOF, 2000.

On the matter of their sisterhood:

“During ‘Proof’ there was a whole discussion about our hair color,” Parker says. ”I thought she should darken her eyebrows, and I lightened my hair to make us look more like sisters--and then I was listening to her in the scene with Ben Shenkman, and when she said ‘She’s my sister,’ there was such a searing level of irrefutable truth and conviction in her voice that I suddenly realized it did not matter one lick what either of us looked like. Johanna acted us into the same gene pool.”

“I revere her talent, “Parker adds. “Getting to act alongside her is one of the greatest gifts of my life. She takes risks and makes them look like she’s just playing. She looks like she’s making it up on the spot though she has worked like mad to create it.”

Parker is clear with me that she wants to make sure that Day is treated well with this piece, and that attention is given to her, because she “is so special, so unlike anyone else.”

“You don’t spend this much time in a theater with someone and not know them in a particularly intimate way,” Parker says, “and I can say she is as deeply good a person as she is an actress. By now she feels like my family, and I can imagine a part of an afterlife that involves both of us haunting a theater together-- torturing the latecomers and wandering the wings and the concessions-- making each other laugh and sleeping under the ghost light. I love her so much.”

When she is told this, Day quips: “We have to wait until we’re dead? That sucks. I remember wanting to sleep overnight at the [Walter] Kerr when 'Proof' was up. You know, stock our fridges, put on some pajamas, and stay the night, with the ghosts and telling stories. We have to die? I don’t like that. I don’t want to wait.”

PART THREE

Johanna Day has a rare, intense, immediate connection to others--a bond develops, you are initiated as family. It wasn’t very long after Day and I met that we joked about getting married (“You’re a gay,” Day joked, “but I can work around that”), and I was soon friends with her siblings on Facebook, who warned me about a family review. I follow their pets and their artwork, and when Margy, Day’s sister, died two years ago, I felt it, not only because I spoke to Day daily while she was in Virginia, waiting for the “awful inevitable,” but because I had heard so many stories about the family, that ineffably funny, wild, and huge-hearted clan.

The Day family, in travel. Johanna had not been born yet, but this is the clan into which she arrived.

A family--wild and funny and devoted-- is present in "How I Learned to Drive," presided over by playwright Vogel, whom Day calls “Mama Paula,” a sweetly present help who watches over everyone and sends food. “I’m here to tell you,” Day says, “there are days I wouldn’t be eating if it weren’t for Paula.” Vogel has gifted the cast of "Drive" with her language, which opens with a burst of prose, given by Parker as Lil’ Bit, that seduces, startles, and charms like a novel or a short story. We can see a changing South; feel the sensual, heavy warmth; imagine some fireflies and the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

When I first saw "How I Learned to Drive" in 1997, my date was my friend Marian Seldes, and she was delighted that I knew nothing about the play. “Give in to it,” she told me, and she loved watching me become, as she put it, “ensorcelled.” I did not know what was coming, but Seldes did (she saw the original production five times), and she slipped her hand in mine when, in a scene of pure affection and physical intimacy, Lil’ Bit refers to her male companion as “Uncle” Peck. Marian squeezed my hand, and there was a gasp in the audience. A handful of people hurriedly left the play that evening, and while I am not denying that they might have been triggered by the story of a young girl being seduced by her uncle, the play is a loving and devastating study of love and forgiveness. Yes, people do awful things, but to survive, to understand, is to accept, and during the one hundred minutes or so of "How I Learned to Drive," we not only come to love Lil’ Bit and Uncle Peck, but we learn to navigate both a car—a 1956 Chevy Bel Air—and our lives. A viewer is put into gear and is floored, just like that car that has been a place of so much sharing.

Day provides rich characterizations as Lil’ Bit’s mother and as Aunt Mary, the wife of Uncle Peck, and her statement about her husband being so good with girls at a certain age will remind you of the shock of your own discoveries within your family. (Day’s recitation of the drinking etiquette of Southern ladies is a very real, very funny showstopper.)

Alyssa May Gold, David Morse, Mary-Louise Parker, Johanna Day, and Chris Myers in Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" at Manhattan Theater Club.

Elia Kazan told me that he advised the actresses playing Blanche and Stella in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" to imagine they were tied to Stanley by invisible ropes—of need, desire, dependency. With his every move, these actresses lurched, retreated, sighed, started—whatever he gave them. This technique was utilized in both the stage and screen productions, and Brando knew nothing of it until Kazan told him years later. There is a similar bond among the actors in "How I Learned to Drive": They are bound by language, history, love, and the catharsis of the play—for me, as well as for Seldes—is to realize that acceptance is not a forgiveness of people or their behavior, but an understanding of oneself, a clear-eyed inventory of who we are, right now. Hate is not an option. As they said of hate in Louisiana when I was growing up: “That dog won’t hunt; that car won’t drive.”

The sense of family is most intense with Paula Vogel’s play, but Day has found it and loved it many times before. During Craig Lucas' "Blue Window," in which Day played a very shy, quiet woman (“Not like me at all!” Day cracks), she was the “new kid. I was so green. I didn’t know anything, and those people were so good to me.” Those people included John Benjamin Hickey, who would maneuver himself behind her and let out a stream of farts most nights. “I don’t know why,” Day says. “To warm me up? [The play did open during a frigid January.] To try to break me up? No, I think it was friendship. They did lots of things to cheer me up. They were the greatest.” They, you should know, included not only Hickey, but director Joe Mantello, J. Smith-Cameron, Allison Janney, David Aaron Baker, Ellen McLaughlin, all of them pure theatre gold.

“And then,” Day interjects, “the review.”

The review in question came from the caustic John Simon, who wrote of Day, after praising everyone else, that “she sticks out like a sore thumb. Or ten.”

“I kept silent about it,” Day remembers, and then I mentioned it one night, and everyone swarmed around me, laughing, comforting. I was in a family. Again.”

“Solitude has its limits,” she tells me. “I like to be in a group of people who are happy and working well, and I want to make things better.” Day is bewildered by cruelty, and when she was witness to the actions of a particularly toxic actress, whose soul is like something you’d scrape from a subway-station floor, she was not judgmental or critical, just sad. “I really don’t know why people are mean,” she confesses. “I don’t know why people hate so many things. Why they speak so badly about other people. I don’t know why people are upset about the sexuality or the gender of people. I am not threatened at all by what other people choose to be or say or do. I don’t have to agree with it, and I damn well don’t have to comment on it. I just go about my way.” Well, not always: Day not only possesses an Amazonian figure, but the mindset as well. I sometimes think she’d kill for her friends. She shows up. She sends bourbon when you’re blue, and she is always planning a road trip. “We’ve gotta get a trailer, a rig,” she says. Day also has land in Virginia, and she dreams of building a compound there, where friends can come and write and sing and dance and smoke and drink and put on airs.

PART FOUR

"I was with my mother when she died," Day says. "She fought so hard, and I let her know that she could go. It was time. I was on that bed with her, and downstairs was the family, all that chaos, laughing and arguing and cooking. Pots and pans. Laughing. Dogs barking. And my mother loved it. That was what she loved. And I'm the same way. I want to be surrounded by happy chaos."

Day can find the beautiful moment—the pearl—from negative experiences. When she was working on a Lanford Wilson play, she walked about in a state of disbelief that she was with this great playwright. “I loved it all,” she says, but one night Wilson, tanked to a distillery level, tried to sucker punch her. “Yeah,” she says, “right through a car window! Lanford Wilson! And all I did was to ask him to behave. He was being…not nice. I dodged the punch. And his behavior improved.” Day quickly adds that Wilson went out of his way to find her and apologize for his behavior. “I loved him. I love him still. I never thought, even when he swung at me, that our friendship was over; that I was never going to look at him or speak to him again. And then this beautiful moment together. The apology, the remorse, was the real Lanford, and I got to be there.”

People are famous now for shaving online; walking about and bitching about things. Talent is often considered elitist, unnecessary, and like Brooke Smith, another multifariously gifted actress I recently profiled, Day is flummoxed to find acting treated almost as a “hobby, a lark. Talent is sort of overlooked sometimes,” Day tells me. “Things are 'branded' or an attitude is worked up, and, boom! It’s up on a stage. I look at things a lot and ask, Is that acting? Are we going to call that acting now? And there are so many terrific actors around, better than I am, wondering where the work is.

Day says these things matter-of-factly, with no bitterness. “It’s gonna work out,” she tells me. “I mean, look at the difference in the past two years. I’m back with my family of actors and creatives. I bump into other people who are excited, eager. Look, we’ve gotten this far, and so many people are always so nice to me.”

One of those is Stoltz, who remembers meeting Day backstage after a performance in "Proof," admitting he had been “a bit starstruck. I stuttered out some compliment about her work that night (heartfelt) and she looked at me with those giant blue/green eyes, burst into laughter and gave my shoulder a little push. In my memory she even said, 'aw shucks' even though I'm sure it was rougher language. I was smitten.

“I didn't really get to know her until she came on to 'Madam Secretary,” he adds. “Sometimes she had reams and reams of dialogue describing policy, which certainly wasn't the best use of her deep emotional well, but we were thrilled that she was with us just the same.”

Tea Leoni and Johanna Day in "Madam Secretary."

“I've seen hours of her dailies over the years,” Stoltz continues, “and even when the scenes weren't singing, she's great fun to watch - you're never sure what she's going to do. It's like watching a cat. She has that spark in her that transcends the material and makes you want to see what she'll do next. She can even make exposition sound interesting, which is invaluable on a long running tv show. I think of her right up there with Lois Smith—an American treasure that deserves to be working constantly, and whenever I can, I pitch her to anyone who is casting something. Not only is she deeply talented, but she's the kind of human that you want to be around - she's smart, she has opinions, she's hysterically funny--she's an authentic human.”

Johanna Day during the run of Lynn Nottage's SWEAT, 2017.

Michelle Wilson and Johanna Day in Lynn Nottage's SWEAT, 2017. Both actresses received Tony Award nominations for their performances.

PART FIVE

Johanna Day has earned: two Tony nominations (for "Proof" and "Sweat"); an Obie award; a Helen Hayes award. She has shared a dressing room and a stage with Elizabeth Ashley during "August: Osage County,", flirted with James Earl Jones during a revival of "You Can't Take It With You," helped Lois Smith onto a pitch-dark stage in a matter of seconds in "Peace for Mary Frances," and once blew up at talkative audience members during her highly praised performance in Brandon David-Jenkins’ "Appropriate." “I was onstage yelling,” she remembers, “a domestic incident on the stage, and I felt that another domestic incident was brewing in the audience, and no one—no one—was doing anything. I got louder and louder and angrier and angrier, screaming at poor Patch Darragh, and then I just turned and yelled at them. I cursed. I think I may have told them to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Anyway, I stormed off and went outside to the Yotel nearby and had a cigarette and burst out crying. But everyone was so supportive, and I got a great ovation at the curtain call, so, you know, it doesn’t take much to turn me around.”

A few months ago, the battery in Day’s car died, and she was momentarily without the funds to replace it, so her car sat, perfectly legal, on the street across from her apartment building. Some neighbors objected, on “principle,” and Day, fearful that the police might be called, considered sleeping in the car overnight, to be there for the officer who might tap on the window to ascertain if the car had been abandoned. However, the image of Day, awakening suddenly to an inquiring policeman, rolling down the window, and trying to explain the situation, became very funny. “I’d be out there on the street,” she said, “saying I was broke, but I’m an actress, and some royalty checks are due, and I’m heading back to Broadway, and the cop would stop and say, ‘You’re an actress? Have I seen you in anything?’ and I would just say, “Oh, Christ, take the fucking car.”

Brooke Smith: Always In the Center of Truth

2022-03-11T20:48:00.003-05:00

Brooke Smith as Merilee in "Big Sky."

When people who care about acting gather together to talk about how it's diminishing or being degraded, certain names are always brought up to engender hope in the group, and one of them is Brooke Smith. During a brief period when I had the ears and the attention of Mike Nichols, he said of Smith that "she was fully intelligent and present all the time, and that is very often not seen as 'acting.' People remain simple--if not dumb--about what they think acting is: Loud, outlined in neon, a parade of adjectives made flesh. To witness an actor inhabiting a character fully, listening, making a mark in the--God forgive this--mise en scène, is to see a rarity."

I was contracted by an online magazine last year to profile Smith when she mounted her own Emmy campaign for her supporting performance in the ABC series "Big Sky." When the campaign failed to net Smith a nomination, the story was dropped, but I think another reason might have been because I was more interested in what Smith represents--a real actor, a true talent, in a wilderness of badness and public relations.

Brooke Smith has never disappointed an audience, a writer, or a fellow player. While she maintains a social-media presence, it is not full of humble bragging ("Can I tell you how awed I am to hear such great things about myself?") nor does she feel compelled to mark every job gained, meal eaten, and despite her passionate views on the world and its politics, she does not engage in arguments or statements implying that she has tapped into something alien or out of reach to others. Smith has also not looked at the future and decided, as someone in her mid-fifties, that a burnishing of the woke wheels through philanthropy or braying indignance might benefit her.

"I just want to keep working," Smith tells me. "And I need to. I have two daughters, one headed to college. [Since our initial interviews, Smith's daughter has entered college]. I have rent to pay. I need to make a living." "Listen," Mary-Louise Parker told me, "I need her to keep working. I need to see her. I believe her every time I see her." When I ask if Smith makes her believe in the power of acting, as others do, Parker says without hesitation, "Absolutely. She is always right in the center of the truth when she acts."

Marian Seldes thought Smith had the capacity to "look like a Madonna, and then terrify you by showing the face of someone in absolute turmoil." When you saw a play or a film with Marian, she might whisper "That's one," which generally meant the person noted was one of her students from Juilliard, where she taught for more than two decades. Seldes whispered, "That's one," when Smith completed a particular scene in Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42ND STREET, but on the street later, when I asked about Smith's time at Juilliard, Seldes confessed that she hadn't attended, "but she has it. She's blessed. Watch her. You'll see."

Brooke Smith in Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street (1994).

There is a cult following for Smith due to her performance in SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS, in which Smith was a pregnant woman turned assassin, engaged in a brutal series of quests for a reality program that now seems terrifyingly prescient. (The film is from 2001, and I highly recommend it.) When Smith is not lumbering about taking down fellow contestants in the hopes of claiming the top prize, she's tending to a sick lover (the preternaturally beautiful and wonderful Glenn Fitzgerald). When I was researching the earlier story on Smith, I ventured into murky rooms online to ask about this actress, and everyone--from teenagers to retirees with a hunger for apocalyptic films--spoke of her as Nichols or Seldes or Parker had: They loved that she felt like a woman in dire extremity, found on the street, and told to do her job--or else. Smith cannot be caught acting, and when she is on the screen with Marylouise Burke, an actress always wound too tight with gewgaws and tics aimed at stealing focus, you find yourself in a diabolically satisfying tango between a very obvious actress looking toward a demo reel and a woman whose fluid has suddenly burst and who must--in the midst of murder and betrayal--give birth to her baby. Even assassins, if played by Smith, have hope.

Brooke Smith in SERIES7: THE CONTENDERS (2001)

The director of SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS is Daniel Minahan, since triumphant with "Game of Thrones," "House of Cards," "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," and "Halston," and he told me he sought Brooke out for the film. "I saw her in an off-off Broadway play," he said, "and her co-star was John Cameron Mitchell. [This was Alan Bownes Little Monsters, in 1994.] I had seen her in Vanya and Silence [of the Lambs], and she was so vivid and alive and authentic. That’s how I fell in love with her. As I fell in love with her as an actor, I was [also] so impressed with how authentic she was in everything she approaches. She is experienced and technically able, but it all comes from a very heartfelt place. I describe her as an actor’s actor." Minahan adds, as did Parker, that working with Smith was to also invite her friendship, which she offers fully, honestly. I can say, from only a couple of telephone conversations with Smith that I trust her implicitly, but I also would not want to try and come between her and an honest thought. It is not that she is cruel, but she is smart, honest, and aware that time is terribly valuable.

Perhaps because her mother was the powerful PR agent Lois Smith, whose clients included Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and Liza Minnelli, Brooke knows the business and how it works, and the most insidious enemy is time. Time is coming for all of us, and talent--and I cannot stress again how much of it Brooke Smith has--can't do anything in a crouch, waiting for a method of expression with a director or a writer of talent. Talent waits and it withers. Talent grows desperate, and suddenly, the talent is on the line doing substandard work to pay the rent or the tuition or the dental bill. Another conversation that often arises, along with the praise of actors we love, is, Why are certain actors always working? We live in a culture that supports and sustains a bewildering number of actors who occasionally rise to the competency of a sophomore at a decent college in a lucky production, and I do not understand it. Smith is smarter than I am, and she doesn't go near that topic, but she addresses acting in general.

"You know,” she says, “in the play Four Dogs and a Bone [by John Patrick Shanley] someone tells a story about a mama bear giving birth to a bunch of babies. She was licking them clean, and right before she got to the last bear, she died. And that bear went into show business. I think of that line every single time I’m on a set. I look for the unlicked cubs." Smith laughed. [Later, talking with Mary-Louise Parker, who appeared in the 1993 premiere of that play, she was not surprised that the story arose. "She loves that story," Parker said, "and it's true."]

Smith continues: "I’ve been thinking about the thick skin it takes to be an actor, to accept this rejection and abuse, and yet when you do the work, you’re expected to be vulnerable, and that’s a dangerous risk. A weird combination, and I feel like people--even in the business--think it's about learning the lines and moving along. It feels like it’s harder than ever to be an actor. Unless it’s a hobby. God, I hate that sense of acting as a side, a hobby. I'm committed to this, and not just as a means of supporting my family, and it feels like people say there’s a million people who will do it for free. We can throw a rock and get someone else." There is a significant pause, and I can imagine that it might be Brooke Smith who may be throwing some rocks soon.

When Smith speaks again, she says she's "not baffled [by the business]. I get nervous. I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, but I loved my work in "Big Sky." I don't think I'm deluded in looking for recognition. I felt about it just as David E. Kelly did. I wasn’t sure where she [the character Merilee] was going to go, and David had said to me that he was very fascinated by people who marry monsters. I’ve noticed that in other projects—"Undoing," "Big Little Lies." The show is not entirely about that that, but I want to know if she knows, if she doesn’t, does she choose not to know. So when they called and asked if I wanted to go to Canada during a global pandemic, I said yes. It’s David Kelly!"

Find "Big Sky" on a streaming service and watch it. Smith's Merilee can be lumbering, tense, her face clouded with doubt and anger, and then she can become giddy with the prospect of romance, a dance, some attention. Watching Smith's face as facts become apparent is a marvel of acting as being, thinking, registering behind the eyes. As David E. Kelly told DEADLINE: "As a show, you want to put your best foot forward, and Brooke is certainly a part of that. She did incredible work for us. It was nuanced and complicated; she driving drama one moment and dark comedy the next. Good acting is good acting, and character actors are hard to find. You're looking for people to play adult roles, complicated roles where the human pathology is nuanced." He then added--It's the reason Brooke keeps getting hired: She's an extremely smart actress."

The Emmy campaign did not succeed in earning Smith a nomination, but it brought attention to a good actress, and Smith continues to work, and she continues to inspire. When you do see her on social media, she is bragging about her daughters, being rapturously greeted by her dog, praising her costars, boasting of nothing but her luck. Mary-Louise Parker mentioned Smith's loyalty, but Smith thinks it is really about placing an emphasis on the important things, and she remembers Ruth Nelson, the formidable actress from the Group Theater, whose husband, actor and director John Cromwell, was particularly destroyed by the HUAC hearings, the blacklist, and Elia Kazan's naming of names. Nelson was aged and frail when she worked with Smith on Vanya on 42nd Street, but she rested well, husbanded her energy, and appeared, fully, when she was needed. Smith would learn that Nelson was offered the role of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, clearly a great part in a play that was going to have an impact on the theater. It's director, however, was to be Elia Kazan, and Nelson could not justify a good career move working with a man she felt to be a traitor.

"She knew what was important," Smith says, "what mattered, and I want to be the same way. The work, the life, the family, the friends. What's important?"

What we see in every performance offered to us by Brooke Smith has that single question--"What's important?"--deeply etched within it.

Bette Davis: A Goddamned Dream

2022-01-12T10:17:00.003-05:00

Bette Davis by Terry O'Neill. O'Neill has said: 'I took this in the apartment of Miss Davis - as she was always addressed - the year after her stroke. When I arrived she knew exactly where she wanted to be photographed ... and had chosen her gown. She epitomised the true professionalism of a special generation of brilliant Hollywood stars.'

There is an inability among actors--most actors--to be honest about this deal we have made with what we think is our art. It is rarely art, and when it approaches something like art, you are witnessing something that came about because of some serious battles, demands, and refusals.

Here's the deal, and we have to own it: If people don't buy your dream of being an actress, then it will not happen. That is reality, and it's best to pack up and dream another dream. Or wait a while to see if you improve or tastes change, but no studio can or should employ you because you have a Goddamned dream or wish. I believed I was talented, that I had a place in this industry, but I was prepared to deal with the possibility that I was mistaken. Once I had proven that I could be good, and that people would come and see me...well, nothing was going to stop me.

Now, the dream suffices. I now have learned to simply turn away from someone who comes to me with talk of dreaming and hoping, but very little talk of working and studying. These dreamers find clusters of other dreamers--most unproven--and find comfort in a room of people who really believe that the consummation of all they saw for themselves is just beyond reach. I went to one of these things, and I couldn't place one of them. Who the hell are these people? There is a reason, I assure you, that you cannot find work or have not been confirmed in your belief in yourself, and it's a hard thing to swallow.

I know why I cannot get the work I would like: I am old, and I am old-fashioned, and it is almost impossible to find a use for me. I have to accept this, just as I accept the roles for which I am ridiculed, but I take them because I hope I can bring some worth to them, and because I have to eat and support people. No one takes care of me at all. And no one tells me if I belong on a screen or a stage.

Actors are so frequently dumb with hope that they will believe anyone who tells them to hang on, to dream with them, to pay the fee, to hold the hands in the class. Holding hands in a class! Goddammit, why is talent the last thing to be considered, but a dream is seen as enough for some fool to claim they're an actor, an artist?

And everything stinks.

[Oh, Bette, it's so much worse now.]

James Grissom

2022

Marian Seldes on Kelsey Grammer: A Joyous Abandon

2021-12-17T10:42:00.000-05:00

Marian Seldes on Kelsey Grammer

Interview with James Grissom

NYC

2006

I remember a joyous abandon, firstly, and also a very dry intelligence--not without heart, but just very crisp. Fumes of this humor rose from everything he did. I know that all of my students--and all actors, because he is now my peer--have fears, but he was very good at hiding those fears, so there was a bigness--of heart, talent, personality--in what he did.

Images of Grammer as Cassio, opposite Christopher Plummer as Iago, in OTHELLO, 1982.

I don't know what was happening to interior Kelsey, but the exterior Kelsey was perfectly prepared, professional, and crisp--there's that word again. I came to think of his acting as a perfectly made hospital bed--everything was covered; there was comfort; order. When I say bigness, I don't mean messiness or artificiality: I mean a complete expression of all he had to give to a part.

Kelsey Grammer, Remak Ramsey, Roy Poole, and John Cunningham in Simon Gray's QUARTERMAINE'S TERMS, 1983.

I love watching him act; I always have. He came to us with a poetic beauty--he had a wild, lovely Byronic look about him. Ravenous. He had a sexuality that not many of the male students had. I don't know if he knew this, and I don't know if he would agree with me. So years pass, and I watch him grow in talent and fame, and nothing seems out of balance: He will not squander his talent. And he shares so beautifully, and he let me into his world, and there I was, in that perfectly made bed with him, with Laura[Linney, on an episode of Frasier), and it was lovely. There is no limit.

Kate Nelligan and Kelsey Grammer in David Hare's PLENTY, 1983.

Katharine Hepburn: Always Up

2021-10-30T16:01:00.001-04:00

Katharine Hepburn, captured by Cornel Lucas, 1956.

Interview with Katharine Hepburn

New York City

1990

My father thought that I was a complete fool when I said I wanted to be an actress. He thought it was a total waste of a good mind, and an invitation to a bad life. I was told that I had been raised to read and think and defend my opinions, and here I was heading into a profession one tiny step up from prostitution. But I did it.

My mother wanted me to be happy, to be fulfilled, and mothers are apt to display this feeling more often and more easily. Still, she wanted me to be careful. Both of my parents decided they would not support me when I came to New York to study and try to have a go at it all. When I was most desperate, and really wanted to study, for instance--I never asked for money for food or clothes or all that; I could go without those--I would write to my father, and he would send me whatever he had earned playing golf or cards or money he claimed he had found lying around. Dirty money, he said. Found money.

But I believed in myself, and I kept at it, and I worked to be as good as I could, and in the back of my mind was this lack of support, this harsh opinion of my trade, and I decided that I was going to be the kind of person who helped other people overcome what their parents or friends or teachers had told them, and I was stunned to hear what some of the most wonderful people had been told.

There is so much talent out there--so many wonderful people--and they operate under a heavy load of absolute bunk about themselves. All of us need to chisel away at these false beliefs, these negative, hateful opinions. I was tough with a lot of people, but I loved them. I did. I felt it was as important that I let them know they were good and needed as it was for me to give a good performance. I felt responsible for everyone. I tried not to boss people around, but my nature is bossy, so, you know, to hell with it. But I meant well. I loved those people, and I hope I let them know how valuable they were, how much they could do, how important this business is.

My father ultimately came around--he had respect for my work ethic, my ability to make money and take care of myself and do what I damned well wanted. He also knew that I was the daughter of my parents, and I was there helping people move up and along. But even if people in your life don't come around, don't respect you, you just have to believe in yourself, keep going, keep working. If I'm around, I'll push you along.

Up! Always up!

FRANÇOISE SAGAN’S FRANCE FOR EDWARD ALBEE

2021-10-04T09:46:00.007-04:00

FRANÇOISE SAGAN’S FRANCE FOR EDWARD ALBEE

FEBRUARY 1,1965ESQUIRE

Françoise Sagan’s France for Edward Albee

"I would very much like to meet Edward Albee and show him around.

But he can go to the theatre or the films on his own.

I prefer people, sitting and talking, looking at each other, not side by side, looking at something else.

I would take him to meet Sartre and Genet—people like that.

We’d ring up, make a date, meet at a café. Any café, really.

The best way to show the town is without a project.

Just wander the streets.

Or we’d get in my car and just go—just run—go, go.

The best café? When we are in the car and going and he feels thirsty and wants to stop, then we see a café—that’s the best.

Late at night we go to New Jimmy’s in Montparnasse.

There are records and dancing and much talk, funny people.

It starts at midnight and goes till eight in the morning.

It is best at four. That’s when the dancing is hottest.

It is very chic up till then;

then everyone is muddled and it gets less elegant.

Or we go watch the girl shows at Le Sphinx or the Jockey along with the B-girls and the Belgian shoe salesmen.

It is funny to go there sometimes.

We meet the night people in Montparnasse.

The sculptor Alberto Giacometti, others.

Or we sit and talk about books, about everything—all night.

And we see the dawn. This he must see. This I must show him,.

There is a light then in Paris that is like no other anywhere else in the world. You are tired, very drunk from liquor and cigarettes, and this dawn happens.

It must be seen. It is funny.

In the spring we go to St. Tropez to the beach, before the tourists come. We stay at La Ponche— it is a small hotel, full of nice people.

You know what’s going on on the third floor even when you live on the fifth floor.

Or we go gambling. I like it very much.

We go to Deauville, though, not to Monte Carlo.

I have my house near there and we drive back after gambling.

My house is in Normandy, near Honfleur.

Full of trees, nobody around.

The farmer there keeps cows. I never drink milk, but I love it there. Or I take him to something he’ll never forget: the Province of Lot, far in the southwest where I was born.

There is no television, no radio—no money to speak of.

People don’t care about money. It is the Middle Ages.

People exist on their own, come into town once a year for shoes. People go crazy there, living alone.

Men, women, they live alone, many of them, and see very few people.

It is different from the France of the cities

and as different from America as anything I can imagine.

It is different from anywhere.”

Joy Williams on REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

2021-10-02T14:32:00.003-04:00

HOLLYWOOD

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

On four actors, dying young

OCTOBER 1982 JOY WILLIAMS

I WAS TWELVE when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause. I was a dutiful child with pigtails, the daughter of a minister—how far out of what’s shaking can one get? I loved Rebel. It was mean and morose and pretty, filmed in a shiny, beckoning darkness shot through with red—the potent, perilous red of James Dean’s windbreaker. All those guns and hot rods. I loved it! My friends loved it. It was our picture. James Dean was twenty-four, Natalie Wood was seventeen, Sal Mineo was sixteen. It was 1955. Today nothing is so horrible that it can’t be told. But then we had tasteful concerns. We had alienation, unspecific sorrows, unmentionable longings.

Nineteen fifty-five was a long time ago. I can hear the alert among you saying, “Very good, Retardina.” But twenty-seven years only sounds like a long time. It was before we realized that Time was our Enemy, before it became apparent that we weren’t going to die so young and so fine. It wasn’t really so long ago.

In 1979 Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel Without a Cause, died horribly of cancer. Just before, he directed, with Wim Wenders, a startling film about his dying, called Lightning over Water, the title coming from an I-ching reading meaning “the condition before transition.” It’s a ghastly film. Ray is dying, dying, dying before our eyes. Then he snarls, “Cut.” The screen goes black, and he dies on without us. Ray wished to bring himself together before he died, but all the camera shows is his disintegration, and that there is no hope. “At what early age did I want to die?” Ray asks, and then confesses, “To experience death without dying, it seemed a natural goal for me.”

Rebel has a very peculiar quality, a romantic pall, a whiff of death, myth, serious matters. Even then, of course, there was that. In 1955 we, the young, watched it with shivery awe. We weren’t absorbing the movie as much as we were absorbing James Dean. Dean was magnetic, vivid, beautiful, young, sullen, sensitive, brilliant, uncompromising, and Dead. He had been killed in a car crash on September 30, 1955, only one week after finishing Giant and less than a month before Rebel was released. Rebel's appeal was obvious, if unmentionable in healthy circles. We were watching the intense, doomed performance of a dead youth, a myth, the myth of those who would wish to see themselves dead without dying. Dean was dead, predead, dead upon our discovery of him. His vivid presence projected a fathomless absence. It was thrilling.

We loved Rebel because it had character and threat. The preposterous plot and execrable dialogue didn’t bother us. We were Fifties kids. Only a Fifties kid could love a swift exchange like: “You live around here?” “Who lives?” We loved Rebelbecause it showed adolescents at their finest, fiercest, most irrationally pure: Jim (James Dean) is bad because he drinks and gets in fights. He drinks because his father (Jim Backus) is an unmanly fool who sometimes wears an apron and in times of crisis wants to sit down and make lists. Things might be better, Jim muses, if only his dad “had the guts to knock Mom cold once.” Judy (Natalie Wood) is bad because her father doesn’t kiss her anymore and hasn’t since she turned sixteen. Plato (Sal Mineo) is bad because his wealthy parents abandoned him to the care of the maid, which is why he shoots puppies on his birthday. The hoods (Corey Allen, Dennis Hopper, Nick Adams, among others) are bad because hoods are bad. Plato grows to love Jim because Jim is nice to him. Plato has big, red lips and eyes like Bambi. He has a picture of Alan Ladd in his school locker. Alan Ladd! Plato is all mixed up.

Judy grows to love Jim because he is tender and brave. Before Jim, she’d loved the pack leader, Buzz, but that was just peer pressure; besides, after the fateful “chickie-run” toward the sea cliff’s edge, Buzz was no more than pudding on the surf-racked rocks below. Who can be loyal to pudding?

Fleeing from the gang, Plato and Jim and Judy hide in a deserted mansion, the same mansion used in Sunset Boulevard, owned by J. Paul Getty (talk about offensive, indifferent dads) and rented to Warners. Inside the house, Judy and Jim play Mommy and Daddy; Plato, a gun in his pocket and mismatched socks on his feet, plays the Baby Boy. The three create a fragile little family, based for an instant on love, honor, and sincerity, but the idyll is brief. When the hoods break in, Plato shoots one of them and runs back to the planetarium. Later, the police shoot him down.

Scooting around the fallen Plato on all fours, Jim howls and weeps. Rebel begins with Jim tenderly covering up a wind-up monkey toy in the gutter. It ends with him tenderly zipping up Plato in the red windbreaker he had given him to keep warm. Dean was extravagant. He didn’t waste a single suffering. He smoked, he cried, he giggled, he touched a girl’s fingers as though they were crystal that might shatter, he prattled like Mr. Magoo, he punched a detective’s desk with his fists, he pummeled his father, he kicked his mother’s portrait, he rolled a cold bottle of milk across his face. In life, this magical creature was five foot eight and round-shouldered; he had poor eyes and a high hairline. But on film he became an angel chosen by darkness. A man named Donald Gene Turnupseed, doodling along a California highway in a tub of a Ford, had extinguished James Byron Dean in his speeding silver Porsche. Death, fast and fabulous, had done it again. Secretly, we were very, very impressed. We knew he could never grow old; we imagined that we would never grow old either.

Well, time passes, and Time has shown us that Rebel Without a Cause was as marbled with Fate as a Texas steer. James Dean’s presence, ranting at us, even as it did then, out of some fourth dimension, remains nerve-racking, while the others . . . the others grew up and then died, that’s what they did. It appears that for the moment, we’re here and they’re not. They died as grown-ups, as grown-ups do, by accident or choice or bad luck; they did not serve the fantasies we had about ourselves at all. Nick Adams committed suicide by a drug overdose in 1968. Sal Mineo developed certain unwise penchants and was stabbed to death in a Sunset Strip parking area in 1976. And on a November midnight in 1981, Natalie Wood, wearing a nightie, a down jacket, and woolen socks, slipped off a yacht and drowned in a cold lagoon. Adams, Mineo, Wood—all gone now.

Their deaths seemed like bad movies that lacked timing and a good script, CHAMPAGNE, THEN DEATH, the Enquirer might scream about Wood’s drowning, but we knew it had all been done better before. Dean knew how to do death right.

Nicholas Ray originally wanted to call his glum classic The Blind Run—a nice metaphor for the rush from youth to ending. Seeing Rebel today is like looking at an object as mournful and secretive and slick as a bone. It has become a genuine Cult Curse production. But it remains, too, what it always was—a romantic fantasy about youth and death, with real death its bright-red heart.

John Gielgud: The Fullest Example of Humanity

2021-07-14T08:03:00.005-04:00

Interview with John Gielgud

Conducted by James Grissom

Telephone/1991

I think that what you are talking about--have been talking about--with all these people who knew Tennessee, and with Tennessee himself, is the search for what you might call the soul. I've come to believe that the soul is not something that is implanted in us, or bestowed upon us, but what we build from what we've seen, what has been done to us, what we've harvested or what we've culled.

When we say of someone that they lack a soul, or soul itself, I think they fail to be curious; they fail to be kind; they fail to understand the value in looking around and within to see what the world is all about. You'll notice that I am not talking at all about acting or the theatre in this conversation, because I think--well, I know--that the work that is most important, no matter what it is we choose to do, is to become the fullest, kindest, most worthwhile human being we possibly can. All of us are limited--spiritually, emotionally, physically--in what we can become or achieve, but what we can call fulfillment, and, if we are really reaching, happiness, arrives, fleetingly, when we are in the act of becoming the fullest example of humanity.

Kind. Patient. Curious. Giving. Quiet more than loud.

Marian Seldes: Our One, Unique Life

2021-03-14T07:30:00.001-04:00

Interview with Marian Seldes

Conducted by James Grissom

NYC

2003

In all the years that I was a teacher, I stressed the importance to young actors to not sit in judgment of their characters: They had to understand, perhaps love, the behavior of these characters in order to play them truthfully, to own them. I hope I also stressed the importance that they not judge themselves or others. We have been given--and must use--our one, unique life, and I never understood those actors who could not see the beauty and the grandeur and the worth of whom they were: They wanted to be something or someone else. They wanted to be famous. They wanted to be noticed. I wanted them to be true to themselves, and I was confident that good things would come to them. Don't judge. Be kind to yourself and others. Work hard and with fairness. I tried to teach that--and also that I was here if they might need me.

Mike Nichols: Be The Lesson

2020-12-18T10:41:00.002-05:00

Interview with Mike Nichols

Conducted by James Grissom

New York City

1992

What I honestly know--from experience--and what I most want to impart to others is that life is the source of all things creative. Stella Adler once told a student in class that his furnace was burning brightly and consistently, but it was heating up all the wrong things: He was obsessed with a career, with meeting people and making moves and always going upward, being seen, being noticed. Stella assured him that his motives were debased, and I think she was right. I think my motives have often been debased, and I regret everything I did or said or was during the times I acted upon the worst impulses available to me.

Among the creatives there is rampant unemployment, and so many of us sit around, empty, a ventriloquist dummy with no hand up our backs to animate us. Our life should animate us, and it remains a mystery to me that so many people I like and often admire have no concept of this. It is tragic to think that the career is the life--the career is an adjunct to the life.

I would suggest that a large life be pursued. I don't mean shooting at sharks from boats or scaling mountains, unless that is where your calling takes you. I'm talking about an expansion of the heart and the mind. See, read, listen to everything. Decide if it warrants your time. See how it--whatever it is--applies to your experience. Love fully and daily, whomever and whatever it may be.

Let the career grab you in the midst of your extraordinary life. Commit to the work. Apply what you've learned. That's where the good work will come from, always.

Good work and good artists are sacrificed daily to careerism, ambition, placement. Don't beg to have others look at you: Become so amplified by life that others cannot look away. Be the lesson.

Alec Guinness: Our Imaginations Are Our Souls

2020-12-09T17:39:00.003-05:00

Interview with Alec Guinness

Conducted by James Grissom

Via Telephone

1991

I thought I was escaping my life because it was so unsatisfactory, and, as I guess we all do, I thought I was alone in this imaginative pursuit--that only I looked about and fancied play-acting and wondering how things might be different, could be different, if only I wished them so, or behaved in a way that made me a different person.

I've brought that sense of play to everything I've ever done, and I don't really care to know what it means, or what it portends, or particularly what it covers up. We can know too much, I think.

So much within my imagination I accept by faith: I assume a lot about things. I jump assuming that I'll be safe. I have always been safe within my imagination, and that is really the only state in which I find myself able to jump.

I think we are losing that capacity to play. The analysis and overthinking of things has come to dominate acting and all the arts, and I don't want to see the scaffolding of the beautiful building. I am content not seeing where the plumbing has been laid out. I have not enjoyed working with actors who need to nail everything down, find the source, exhaust the full biography of the character. I am going to die not knowing everything about me, for heaven's sake, why must I know every single thing about the character I'm playing? All relationships are full only due to what we bring to them through our imagination, and that is on and off the stage.

I think, and I am not at all claiming to be expert, that our imaginations are our souls, and that is where we find our salvation.

Photo: Lord Snowdon, 1979

2020-12-01T19:45:00.001-05:00

DECEMBER 1983 DOTSON RADER

The towering giants of the modern American theater are Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, each of whom captured society's sense of loss and longing. Williams was certainly the theater’s major voice over the past fifty years. A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, notably, dealt with themes never before so boldly confronted on the American stage. With his death this year we lost one of our most distinctive literary figures.

Ifirst met Tennessee Williams shortly after he got out of the mental ward of what he called Barnacle Hospital, in St. Louis, where he had been confined by his brother, Dakin. Tennessee had flipped out on copious amounts of Doriden, Mellaril, Seconal, Ritalin, Demerol, amphetamine, and too much sorrow in Key West, and Dakin was called when his brother, in a drug-alcohol stupor, fell against a hot stove and badly burned himself. After having Tennessee baptized a Catholic at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Key West—an event lost forever in one of the boozy black holes of his mind—Dakin hauled him to the nuthouse. Soon he was locked in an isolation cell in the violent ward for fighting with other inmates over what they would watch on the communal television set. He liked soaps, and the other loonies wanted to see game shows; a row ensued, and the orderlies dragged him off and shut him away in a padded cell, where he suffered two coronaries and nearly died. For all that and more he never forgave Dakin, and it inculcated in him a terror of going mad that never left him. Years later, near the end of his life, when Tennessee would do something particularly odd—dress in pajamas for a formal party or wander about Key West in a fright wig pretending to be his sister, Miss Rose—I would laugh and try as gently as possible to dissuade him, all the while knowing that when the peculiarity of his actions finally sunk in, he would take it as evidence that his pilot light was about to burn out and Barnacle Hospital lay ahead as the last stop on his trolley line. And days of convincing him once again that he was not going crazy, senile, that one cell too many had not been burned out by booze—all that would follow endlessly.

“I’m happy I never had any children,” he told me before he died. “There have been too many instances of extreme eccentricity and even lunacy in my family on all four sides for me to want to have children. I think it’s fortunate I never did. Miss Edwina [his mother] went crazy. She thought there was a horse living in her room and when she didn’t want to do something, she’d say, ‘I can’t, Tom. I have to go riding today!’”

The night I met him, I had gone to the opening of an underground movie in Greenwich Village, a porno flick passing as a work of art. The theater was jammed with famous people, writers and painters mainly, which surprised me because I didn’t realize then what I know now: common to the people who create our art is a passion for pornography. To the degree that if you bombed five or six skin houses in Manhattan on any given afternoon, you’d probably wipe out half the literary establishment in America. I do not know why that is, nor why so many of our greatest artists—painters, writers, poets, composers—are either gay or Jewish or both. But there you are.

After the movie I went to a party in SoHo, a district of New York that wasn’t fashionable then. The party was held in a filthy loft with dim lights, mattresses on the floor, Day-Glo posters, cheap wine, dope, and naked bodies. Among those present were the Warhol gang and Jim Morrison of the Doors, who was given to sexually displaying himself at parties. Also there was the usual assortment of druggies, fetishists, whores, and other popular figures of the day. I suppose in looking back it seems curious that the greatest playwright of our age would be present, but we were in the lees of the Sixties, when you discovered the most famous people in the most improbable places, at Maoist rallies, for example, or in the sex rooms of the Anvil. And Tennessee, who thought himself a radical, a revolutionary, had been physically incapacitated during much of the decade and so had an intense, if belated, curiosity about the social, sexual, and political movements of the period, especially as they touched the young. He liked to slum, in part because he identified with the outcast, the loser, those up against it. And also, in being places where respectable people thought it was unsuitable to be seen, he made a kind of cockeyed solidarity with those who shared with him a hatred of the rich.

“The Sixties were a decade of great vitality,” he remembered more than a decade later. “The civil rights movement, the movement against war and imperialism. When I said to Gore Vidal, ‘I slept through the Sixties,’ I was making a bad joke. I was intensely aware of what was going on. Even in the violent ward I read the newspapers avidly. Then we had brave young people fighting against privilege and injustice. Now we have the de la Rentas. They are the Madame du Barrys of our time! I find them an outrageous symptom of our society, the shallowness and superficiality, the lack and fear of any depth that characterizes this age, this decade. It appalls me.”

At the party, Candy Darling, a drag queen and Warhol superstar who would later star in Tennessee’s Small Craft Warnings, came up to me and said in her breathless way, “Tennessee Williams is here, and he wants to meet you!”

I said, “I thought he was dead.” I thought that because he had disappeared from public view. In the Sixties people were dropping like flies right and left, and if you didn’t hear about somebody for a time you assumed he had succumbed.

Candy Darling brought me over to meet him. I was dressed in a black leather jacket, leather boots, a black cowboy hat, which was the costume I affected then. Tennessee was wearing a gray suit, a multicolored silk scarf, and the most hideous tie I had ever seen—a sort of fluorescent rainbow of clashing colors that Eighth Avenue pimps adore. I was amazed by how tiny he was. (When his body was taken out of the Hotel Elysée in the black plastic bag and lifted into the morgue wagon, I was again reminded in the most terrible way of how little a man he was: so much brilliance came from so small a flame.)

Although he had read one of my books and some of my magazine stuff, he pretended to take me for a hustler. It was the only pass he ever made at me, and in years to come I would realize that if I had consented it would not have worked, because his sexual taste was so specific and so completely delimited by his memory of the body of Frank Merlo that any sexual engagement between us would have been unhappy. For it was through sex that he sought to bridge the distance between himself and his late lover. It was Merlo’s death that had shattered him and in the years that remained he tried to overcome the loss, but he never did.

“Frankie [Merlo] was so close to life!” he once told me. “I was never that close, you know. He gave me the connection to day-to-day and night-to-night living. To reality. He tied me down to earth, baby. And I had that for fourteen years, until he died. And that was the happiest period of my adult life.”

So the night I met him, Tennessee grinned at me and asked, “How much do you get a night?”

“Two hundred bucks,” I replied, playing along.

He paused, rolling his eyes at Candy. “Well, baby, what do you charge to escort an older gentleman to dinner?”

“A hundred bucks.”

He feigned shock, felt in his pockets for money, pulled out a few bills. After making a great show of counting his cash, he looked up and asked, “Do you suppose we could settle for lunch?”

He was fifty-nine, and I was twenty-six, but to me we both seemed so much older than we were.

The following day I met him for lunch at the Plaza Hotel, where he was staying, and I ended up spending three days with him in his suite until he left for Chicago. Quickly I became used to his routine. He would arise early and make himself a martini, order a pot of coffee, and with a bottle of wine in hand toddle into the living room and sit at his portable typewriter, where he would work until noon. Then we’d lunch and go for a swim. He would swim at the Y, although he had guest privileges at the New York Athletic Club. But he wouldn’t go there anymore because the members would make antigay remarks about him and it reminded him too painfully of his father, the shoe salesman, who would cruelly call him “Nancy” in front of his friends. “They’re all the same, baby. Shoe salesmen with a bad territory and wives they can’t abide. So they take it out on us.” But that habit of writing every day and swimming he maintained until he died. It’s what kept him alive as long as it could.

And, too, I became used to his falling down, his drug haze, his drinking; hysterical laughter, rage and remorse, the web of self-destructive habits that would undo him. But in some unknown way the spirit that gave the world Blanche DuBois and Stanley, Chance Wayne and Alexandre del Lago, Big Daddy, Amanda Wingfield, Sebastian and Mrs. Venable, One Arm, and more was, by their very creation, so depleted of defense, rendered so exceptionally vulnerable, that it required the “ministrations,” as he would say, of drugs and booze to make it through the night. When I met him what I was witness to was the beginning of his irreversible decline, when he could no longer keep his torment under control.

Tennessee told me that artists—by that he meant writers, for he never referred to them by any other term—spend their lives dancing on a high wire without any protective net beneath them, and when they fall it is sudden and final. Only Tennessee’s end wasn’t sudden. It was protracted and painful, lasting more than a decade during which he saw himself held up to public contempt. One of the few times I saw him cry was when he read a review by John Simon entitled “The Sweet Bird of Senility.” Finally, he came to dread every new production, feared the public, and, except for Claudia Cassidy and Clive Barnes, hated the critics. When I first knew him he delighted in being recognized in public. By the end of his life, it mortified him, because he felt like currency debased, like an old ham who had become a caricature of himself.

To again state the obvious: he was our greatest playwright. Only he didn’t know it. He was convinced that he was a failure, that his work and life were beyond repair and his plays would not live.

He had begun as a poet, starved as a poet, and because of the very resistance of the world to his poetry, it came to occupy a place of such inordinate importance in purity in his mind that he finally believed that history’s judgment on him would rest on his verse. His life as a poet was associated with his early years—the lack of recognition, the poverty and hopelessness of a young poet in this country. His success as a playwright was almost inadvertent, and when it came to him late—he was thirty-five—it was so sudden and massive, so out of proportion to what he had come to expect, that he could never believe it would last.

He suspected that his career was a fluke, a series of gimmicks, and sooner or later he’d be found out.

From that came his paranoia. “If I didn’t have my demons, I wouldn’t have my angels.”

His demons won the day.

But I didn’t know that about him in the days we were first together. All I knew was that I, like every other writer who came after him, was irrevocably affected by his work. You couldn’t get away from him because he had changed the way writing was done. With The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, Summer and Smoke, and other plays, he married poetry to naturalism and opened drama to subject matter never before touched upon in our theater. Incest, homosexuality, cannibalism, impotency, drug addiction, cancer, madness, sexual frenzy, ineffable loss and longing, all redeemed and beatified by poetic gifts for dialogue and scene construction unmatched by any other writer. He ended the puritan sensibility in American theater and liberated it, poetically and thematically, from the moralism and falseness and middlebrow smugness that had held it bound. In so doing, he helped free us all and ushered in an age when, among other things, the opening of a pornographic movie could be a social event. In sum, Tennessee Williams forever changed America’s knowledge of herself, opening up to light the darkest corners of her psyche, and thereby forced her to accept truth she did not wish to confront.

Two years ago, on his seventieth birthday, I went to Chicago to be with him for the opening of his last play, A House Not Meant to Stand. In a way, being there, he had returned to his beginnings, for it was in Chicago that The Glass Menagerie gave him his first success. He was staying in a four-bedroom duplex apartment on top of the Radisson hotel, in an oppressive Twenties-style place that delighted him. He dubbed it the Norma Desmond Suite. He was in high spirits, deeply tanned, and optimistic about the play.

On the morning of his birthday he opened a few gifts and cards and we had champagne. By then, his friendships with the famous who had made their careers on his work—Brando, Taylor, Kazan, Beatty, and others—had fallen away. He felt it.

After swimming that afternoon, we sat drinking in his makeshift study and talking about writing. That, finally, was his life.

I asked him if he had any regrets.

“Oh, God, yes. But I can’t think about them now.”

He smiled and shook his head. He reached for his wine glass, his hand making an extraordinarily elegant arc as it reached the cold surface; his fingers, one by one, slowly touching it and then lifting it. It was a gesture unique to him, and it brought back such memories to my mind—good times, laughter, pranks, outrageous camping. And the kindliness of his nature.

All of those who met him when they were young and came to know him well will tell you what I do: that they never knew anyone kinder.

He was the net under the wire for us.

“All my life,” Tennessee said, “I’ve cared about the sufferings of people. There are few acts of volition. I don’t believe in individual guilt. I don’t think people are responsible for what they do. And yet, knowing that, I believe the moral person must try to avoid evil and cruelty and dishonesty as best he can. That remains to us.”

His greatness is that he tried to do that harder and longer than any other artist.

When he died, he was working, naturally, on a new play. He titled it In Masks Outrageous and Austere, from a poem by Elinor Wylie. I do not know if he ever finished it, but he talked a lot about it, and I read scenes from it. Or rather I would start to read a scene, and he would grab it from me impatiently and say, “Baby, you don’t know how to read!” Then he would sit back, reach for his wine, and, in his deep voice with its Mississippi drawl, read what he had written, cackling with laughter at the most sorrowful passages.

I can hear him reading now as I can hear him padding about the house in the middle of the night and knocking at my door before dawn and asking me to sit awhile with him because he cannot sleep, he is frightened, and will I stay with him until it is light? I can feel myself holding him, listening to him breathe after he’s taken yet another Seconal to sleep, listening to make sure the breaths are deep enough and long enough to signal that sleep has come and I can creep away knowing he is safe. He said many times that “death doesn’t like crowds. It comes to you when you’re alone.”

He was right.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

Mike Nichols on Bette Davis, Celeste Holm, and FAG Shampoo

2020-11-11T15:22:00.001-05:00

Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Joe Mankiewicz, and Celeste Holm on the set of All About Eve.

Interview with Mike Nichols

Conducted by James Grissom

NYC

2000

There was this dream--always--to work with her [Bette Davis], but never the right property or the right time. The stars never aligned. Of course, she never recuperated from not being in the film of [Who's Afraid of] Virginia Woolf? That was her part, you understand, and she felt she was handling her rejection well, even though she was merciless about Elizabeth [Taylor] and the film until I would remind her that it also my film.

She loathed people openly. Her honesty was admirable, although it never occurred to her that she could keep her hatreds silent. I never knew she loathed Celeste Holm until the three of us found ourselves together a party in New York. Celeste always struck me as very actressy, bubbly, a font of endless cheer and chatter, but Bette hissed at her. Do spray your joy, Celeste, and leave us alone, she said. Celeste turned from bisque to rugged stone, and moved away, held head high, chin quivering.

Bette explained herself: She hated phonies, and to her Celeste was the epitome of a phony. Celeste had the effrontery to upbraid Bette on the set of All About Eve because she failed to believe that Davis was actually nervous about her performance, about all of her performances. Celeste had a theory that actors--good actors--were not shy, were not afraid of anything: This is why they were good. Celeste offered Davis some exercises to boost her self-esteem and to get her, if I remember correctly "on the right track."

Bette told me she had to go and trash a quarter of her trailer, after which she and Gary Merrill sent her on a fruitless, you should pardon the term, search for a shampoo called FAG, which was touted to be the best in the world, and available at only the finest salons. Celeste had a hair obsession, apparently, and she returned furious, no doubt because of the reactions she received asking for FAG shampoo.

I later asked Joe Mankiewicz about some of this, and he rolled his eyes and said he'd rather not relive the bitchery on the set of All About Eve.

Self-esteem is almost always possessed by the wrong people, and everyone from whom greatness has excreted has had sleepless nights and performance anxiety, and Bette felt that Celeste was a skilled bubble of cheer who, in fifty years or so, would simply be a footnote in things written about Bette Davis. We shall see.

Edward Albee: Uncomfortable Quarters

2020-07-09T14:56:00.000-04:00

(Inge Morath)

Interview with Edward Albee

Conducted by James Grissom

New York, New York

In the home of Marian Seldes

2002

Demands begin with the playwright--with any writer. You must demand that you tell the truth about something important to you. You must demand that it may take you to uncomfortable quarters, but you will remain there to see whatever it is you have all the way home, to cop a title.

Now if an audience has no interest in taking this journey with you--asking these questions you've raised--you fail. You are a commercial failure, as I have been and will continue to be, because I cannot become the playwright who writes with an assured hand and can always guarantee an audience. This will never change.

What has changed is that audiences no longer want to be challenged, to go to dark quarters. They may enjoy a thrilling moment or two in a dark quarter, but you can only please them if you get them back into the light and the comfort of their prejudices by ten-thirty, ten-forty-five, at the latest.

I don't think the world works that way. People don't work that way. I am writing about people in this world and how they behave, and it may be that people don't want to see it. I will have to live with that, and I can live with that. But playwrights coming up behind me: What do they face? What truths can they reveal? What questions can they ask?

It is entirely possible that the play, as we once knew it, will entirely disappear. Comfort and affirmation will flow freely.

Maggie Smith: Over There

2020-06-21T17:42:00.002-04:00

Image from Lord Snowdon, 1970.

Notes from Tennessee Williams

Scattered across a bed in New Orleans

1982

Glass shattered and resting on a shiny floor. Damage or design? Shiny but dangerous. Sharp. A distance is required.

Style requires a distance, in anything. Style abhors intimacy. Style is performance--it's big and its movements require space. We stand over here, and it does its thing over there.

The intimacy that exists with Maggie Smith is with her work, the words upon which she stands, cavorts, poses, often jumps from with joy or disgust. There is some intimacy with her fellow players, but she's really on her own.

I would like her in my sights, a boat that often drops its motor and drifts, alone, in the right light, where it needs to go. Over there.

Marian Seldes on Tallulah Bankhead: The End of the World

2020-06-18T18:20:00.000-04:00

Interview with Marian Seldes

Conducted by James Grissom

NYC

1994
All images by Dorothy Wilding, from 1939, for The Little Foxes

No one seemed less innocent or pure than Tallulah, and yet she was very sentimental about the innocence of others. She really wanted the world to be romantic and sweet, and as I've written, she was horrified that Kat [Seldes' daughter] did not believe in Santa Claus, and she was devastated that I did not believe in God. She was amazed that I could function without being girded by acts of faith. I told her my faith was in people, and she sneered, because, I think, she felt that people were only good, and only on occasion, because of Santa Claus or God or the tooth fairy or the wishes made on eyelashes.

Tallulah was very generous with me, and she asked me to care for her during our time together. I needed to watch after her terrible, burned hand; her alcohol consumption; her little dog; her friends who might stay too long backstage and keep her from sleeping. I was her assistant--Blackie--on the stage [in Tennessee Williams' "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore"] and I was her assistant off stage some of the time. I didn't mind. I loved and idolized her, and I knew, as all of us did, that it would not be a long working relationship.

President Kennedy was assassinated during our time with the play, and Tallulah was devastated. She really felt that the end of the world was imminent. Everything she loved was dying or sick, and she included herself. How long, she wondered, could she go on being Tallulah Bankhead? It was exhausting for her; marvelous for us.

I remember that lovely apartment of hers. Getting her home and ready for the night. Sweet-smelling, perfectly costumed, tired. Sleep rarely came easily for her, and she would call me. I had a life and a daughter, but I took her calls. I listened. I let her become exhausted leaning on me and my ear late into the night.

I saw her absolutely brilliant on the stage--in The Little Foxes and The Skin of our Teeth--and very good in so many others. She may have disappointed playwrights and material, but she never, ever disappointed an audience. She was the first person to ever say of me that I was a good broad. A broad! I liked that. I knew it was a great compliment coming from her.

Tennessee Williams: Tallulah Bankhead Was A Star

2020-06-18T13:05:00.002-04:00

Dorothy Wilding, 1939.

Interview with Tennessee Williams

Conducted by James Grissom

1982

There are no stars in the theatre any longer. There never will be: the foundation on which our theatre now stands is so antithetical to any constancy of quality or style or substance. It's just neon and noise and a quick buck. I despise it. Every season someone is propped up as 'the new star,' and their tiny twinkle is forgotten in a year or two and they are off in pilot season or biding time in plays so dreary that you forget them as they unravel before you. ....Tallulah [Bankhead] was a star. A real star. She was a star on the stage and on the street. On the contact sheet, in the portrait. In a restaurant or a hallway. She had talent--a great talent, actually--and soon there was no place to put it but various urns of camp some fags had placed before her to display. She turned against herself, yes, but many turned against her before the final degrading years.

Dorothy Wilding, 1934.

Dennis Hopper on Marilyn Monroe: There Was Magic In Her

2020-06-16T14:05:00.001-04:00

Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1956.

Interview with Dennis Hopper

Conducted by James Grissom

Via Telephone

1997

Is there really anything left to say about Marilyn? I don't think so. Marilyn was a work of art, what Tennessee [Williams] liked to call an ambulatory work of art, and art is what it is. We respond to it; react; recoil; find comfort. The art does not change, but we do.

There was magic in and about her. That's how people become stars, then icons, then legends. Was she a good actress? I don't know. Can anyone say? Those who are moved by what she did will say she was a good--perhaps great--actress, and we can't deny them their opinions.

But let's not talk about Marilyn and her problems and her lovers and her fears and her flaws. Those rested within her and were the heartbreaks of those who loved her. Let's talk about Marilyn and her work and what it means to us.

We just fucking think far too much of our opinions about things, and fail to feel nearly enough.

Harold Pinter: We Will Die Of Stupidity

2020-06-16T12:04:00.003-04:00

Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1962.

Interview with Harold Pinter

Conducted by James Grissom

Via Telephone

1997

Even if there is a mushroom cloud hovering above our corpses, we will be found to have died of stupidity. Even if we starve in fields or drop dead from chemical or gas leaks in our inferior homes, we will have died of stupidity.

We are dying of stupidity now.

You and I can find each other within a day via an e-mail, and within another day, we are on the phone talking about things. Time has taken on a new meaning and so, therefore, has life. If you and I, strangers, can meet and talk in so short a time, the logic of stupid minds immediately begins to wonder how quickly can fortunes be made, hidden, exploited? How quickly can land be purloined? How quickly can things be monetized, branded?

Life every day fails to hold any deep meaning. We are truly and totally merely subjects, consumers, at whom things are thrown to eat and smell and repeatedly buy. This gives our life an order that work and study once did, but those are now held in disregard, for where is there money to be had from the liberal arts or prayer or knowing anything that can't get a fast turnaround and an early retirement?

Prejudice keeps us feeling good about ourselves when our stupidity knocks at our consciousness. To not be black or female or Asian of Latin can make a lot of people feel good who can't think or enjoy the work of others who can and could.

Getting and spending, you know? We are transactions, constructions of commerce, wards of war, and we define ourselves as good citizens, patriotic, if we walk the carefully paved walkways to our destruction.

We have all shown up quickly knowing nothing, and we will all be dead soon of our stupidity, but happy in our final moments if we are white and assured, a little warm, with some bulging cupboards, and a pot on the boil.

Marian Seldes on Audrey Hepburn: Run Toward Kindness

2020-06-14T08:34:00.001-04:00

Audrey Hepburn in her dressing room, 1954, by Mark Shaw.

Interview with Marian Seldes

Conducted by James Grissom

New York City

1991

Everything about Audrey was magical, and I was aware of her need to have things work well for others. She was magical because of her beauty and her talent and her charm, but she amplified her magic, her power, by virtue of constant work at remaining above the din and the dirt of everyday life. I learned from her. I learned that it is a discipline to be kind, to pay attention, to move things along for other people.

It is also a form of denial, but one that is healthy, that protects a person and those around her. Audrey was as frightened of a negative thought or a dark day as she was of the war that had shaped her as a child. She ran toward kindness, and I had always known that I wanted to be that kind of person, and she taught me how I might become that person.

Bette Davis: I've Had It With Gratitude

2020-05-21T09:15:00.000-04:00

Interview with Bette Davis

Conducted by James Grissom

By Telephone

1984

Listen, I've had it with gratitude! You know I love Marian [Seldes], and she is why we are here, in this fashion, together, but she's awfully gaga about who we are and what we do and where we place our gratitude.

I am not--nor should I be--grateful because someone recognizes me as an actress. That is what I do! I recognize myself as an actress, and I show up to improve and work and give and bleed. That is what being an actress is all about, in my opinion. I do not fall to my knees because someone deigns to cast me in something. I fall to my knees if they get out of my way and let me move forward--bad or good--and then guide me to the best performance. That is their job.

But grateful? Please, my dear, you're looking at a lot of blood and sweat when I show up to work, and there should be some gratitude that I'm even in the room. I do not know everything, but I know a lot, and that has to be acknowledged, or I'll find something else to do, somewhere else.

I am very lucky, but luck shows up fully when you do. Nothing was given to me or delivered to me as if by some fluke. I went out and earned it. I am grateful for my mother, who instilled in me a brutal work ethic: I do not fade. I am grateful that I've had health for most of my life, so I can show up and work and study and fight.

But listen to me: No one should be too far in debt to anyone because they have talent. Talent is a gift--a needed gift--and never let anyone diminish your self-respect by leading you to believe that they have allowed something to happen.

Allow less and demand more. This requires a great deal of work, and I don't think most people want to work--they just want to be famous or employed. Have some self-respect for God's sake, and move yourself into the position you deserve.