Dropped Names (12 page)

“You go right away to bed, Cora,” Bunny said.

We returned to the dining table and Jackie said:

“We all better get a shot,” as calm as could be.

I drove us into town in an open Jeep to the small clinic Bunny had helped organize for the locals. We stood in line on the steps leading to the porch as one by one the doctor gave us a shot of gamma globulin. When I came out of the clinic, Jackie was sitting on the steps with a beautiful local child on her lap; she had removed her scarf and was tying and untying it around the little girl's head, as the child's mother sat on the ground nearby. The child scampered off her lap and went back to her mother to show off her present. Jackie sat smiling, holding her knees. Even with the possible threat of jaundice hanging over her, she seemed utterly relaxed and content.

Back in the car we were laughing about who was going to turn yellow first and should we coordinate our clothes at dinner to whatever shade we turned. The cook and the rest of the staff were all given shots. She recovered fully and thankfully the rest of us were spared.

I
t was only in Antigua and the Cape that I spent private time with Jackie. I almost never saw her in New York except occasionally at a small restaurant in the East '90s called Sarabeth's. Ari was dead. It was 1985 or so. I was now married with two small kids and she'd settled into her New York life as an editor and lived with financier Maurice Tempelsman. One wintry afternoon I ran into her on 86th Street, just around the corner from her Fifth Avenue apartment. We stood in the nearby doorway of the service entrance; her tucked inside, my back to the street, arms folded in front of me to keep warm. She rested her hands on them.

“You've made a great success,” she said. “I've seen you in your plays.”

“Why don't you ever come backstage?” I asked.

“Oh, you're too famous for me now,” she said.

When I got home to our new apartment on 83rd and Madison, my wife told me that Bunny Mellon had just called. It had been a while since I talked to her. I called back.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I just ran into Jackie.”

“Oh really?” she said. “Why don't we go to her Christmas party together. I'm sure she'd love to have you.”

“Can I bring my new wife?”

“Was that your wife I spoke to?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, there's my private line. I'll call you back.”

She never did. And I never saw Jackie again.

D
uring the time I spent with her, Jackie was arguably the most famous woman in the world and in complete charge of both her public and private personas. There was nothing of the victim about her. Nothing remotely fragile or tentative. My feeling was always that she relished her fame, her power, and her mystery, and knew exactly how to market and exploit it. Fate had intervened in what might have been the normal privileged life of an attractive, well-mannered, educated young woman and catapulted her to the center of the world stage. And she was going to rule her place on that stage whether as First Lady, the wife of a tycoon, or a book editor at a publishing house. She possessed an enormous inner strength and steely surety that had little to do with, it seems to me, where fate had brought her. Jackie, as I knew her, would have done just fine no matter where she landed. Like the small-town magician whose balloon took him off course and drifted down into the Land of Oz, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis enthusiastically embraced the role of Wizard bestowed upon her by the populace and made the most of it.

Unlike him, though, Jackie was equally adept both in front of and behind the curtain. Her face could go from that famous radiant smile to solemn and blank in a second. Nobody was better at playing dumb than Jackie when she wanted to.

O
ne afternoon, shortly before she married Ari, she, Bunny, Liza, and I were having lunch at a tiny restaurant in Hyannis. Jackie was without makeup or jewelry and dressed unobtrusively in a simple top and slacks. We had come in unannounced and all the proprietor could provide was a table in the back next to the kitchen. She was perfectly happy to sit there out of sight of most of the patrons.

We were in happy, animated conversation when a man passed by on his way to the restroom. He stopped, turned around, and came back to the table. “Aren't you Jackie Kennedy?” he said.

“Am I?” she answered.

“You are! I know you are!”

“Well then, you didn't have to ask, did you?”

She was not impolite, rude, or dismissive. Her face, however, was dark and impassive. The man grew uncomfortable but seemed frozen in his place, staring at her. Jackie offered nothing. He then made to leave, saying: “Oh, I'm sure it's you. I'd bet anything.”

“Well,” she said, “when you find out, let me know.”

A
fter she died, I rummaged around in my memorabilia for a small item she'd given me on the Mellon plane coming back from one of those idyllic trips, but never found it. She was walking up the aisle back from the john and plopped down next to me.

“You know, I don't have any way of getting in touch with you other than through Bunny,” I said. She reached into her bag, pulled out a small white matchbook, and wrote on it “J,” and a phone number, stuck it in my shirt pocket, then started to leave.

“Don't you want mine?” I asked.

She took out a small leather book, wrote it down, dropped the book in the bag, and said:

“There. Now I've got everybody's number!”

HUME CRONYN
and
JESSICA TANDY

M
arried couples, it seems to me, have enough trouble surviving the institution without the extra burden of their names being publicly attached to each other like frozen Popsicle sticks. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks—all un-divorced long-term marriages that somehow thrived and survived the two-for-one sales. Hume and Jessie had a number of advantages. They were wealthy, aristocratic, and equally matched as actors—neither a great, but both highly skilled and intelligent.

In their case, I was fairly certain it was Hume who was the diva and Jessie the go-along. The impression began when I was in college. Sometime in the late 1950s they came touring through Syracuse, New York, where I was attending the university. I don't remember the play. But I do remember getting myself backstage quickly even before their curtain calls had finished and being able from the wings to watch them take their final bows. With my pen and program ready, as the curtain hit the stage, poised to ask for an autograph, the stars were quickly wiped from my eyes as Hume whirled on Jessie and said:

“That cannot happen again. Not again!” and made a beeline directly toward me. His face was purple with rage as he flew past, unaware of my presence. Marching down a long, wide hallway, his voice echoing behind him: “No, no, no. Disgraceful.”

Jessie, dashing not far behind, was calling out, “Hume, please, please, let me explain.” He went in and slammed the door as she was coming toward it. Up she came, knocked, entered, and the battle raged on.

I left bereft, but at nineteen years old, certain I wanted to be wherever something was that passionately important to someone. I thought they had been wonderful in the play, but magnificent in the hallway.

I
n the 1977–78 season, the first
I Love NY
commercial was shot and premiered at the now defunct Tavern on the Green restaurant. I closed out the spot as
Dracula
with the line, “I Love New York! Especially in the evening!” When the lights came up to wild applause, Hume shouted out to the crowd:

“Well, if we'd known we were all going to be supporting Mr. Langella . . .” and then came over and kissed me.

T
hat was the beginning of a lifelong friendship mostly with New York visits. Once you're inside the New York theatre community, you are a forever member, no matter the exigencies of your career.

One night Hume called and said, “Pick us up after your show and I'll take you to dinner.” They were appearing in a big hit,
The Gin Game,
at the John Golden Theatre and I was enjoying playing the Count at the Martin Beck Theatre.

Hume and my former wife were deep in conversation across the table, while Jessie and I started talking about sex in the dressing room. We both agreed it was right up there with a standing ovation.

“What are you two laughing about?” Hume called out.

“Nothing, dear. Just sex in the dressing room.”

“Sex in the dressing room? Never heard of such a thing.”

“Well, you haven't been listening,” Jessie said.

T
hat season the four nominees for a Best Actor Tony Award were Hume, Jason Robards, Barnard Hughes, and me. At the ceremony picking up our nomination certificates and taking photos, Hume said, “Well this is a waste of time. We three have all got one. It's Barnie's.”

And it was!

I
sent Jessie some flowers as a thank-you for handing me an award one afternoon, and she sent this note:

“When are we going to play Hamlet and Gertrude?”

I wrote back: “I'm too old and you're too young.” It was only one of dozens of opportunities missed by me over the years.

L
ate in Jessie's career she became a film star with
Driving Miss Daisy
and won an Oscar. Hume also had a success in the film
Cocoon
, but edgily regarded Don Ameche's winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that film as typical Hollywood Bullshit.

“Imagine,” he said, “if I had done that backflip.”

He was referring to a moment in the film when, having taken a magic potion, all the old men become young again. Don's character, feeling a new energy, gets on the dance floor with Gwen Verdon and performs a stunning backflip. It was, of course, done by a stunt man, with Mr. Ameche afterward in a big close-up, beaming broadly. “That's what did it,” said Hume. “The least popular guy on the set wins a fucking Oscar.”

But despite his displeasure, never during Jessie's renaissance did he seem anything but delighted for her. Nor do I think he ever took Ameche's win seriously to heart.

A
year or so before Jessie's death, she sat in front of me as we watched a terrible performance from one of her contemporaries long past her more youthful skills and desperately trying to recapture them. At intermission, she turned around and I leaned forward on the back of her seat. She had a fan in her hand and tapped my arm with it.

“You would tell me, darling, wouldn't you?” is all she said. She was age appropriate to the end.

H
ume became ill and then reclusive in his final years and all entreaties to come visit him were rebuffed. We had one phone call toward the end. I had sent him a script in which he would play just one lovely scene in a film. He called:

“Frank, darling. How kind of you to think of me. But I'm afraid I could not live up to your expectations.”

Not possible. From that night, at nineteen years of age, when I first stood in awe of them backstage in Syracuse, New York (an incident not recalled by either), in my eyes, neither one had ever disappointed.

RAUL JULIA

“G
reat.”

“Oh my God, that's
great
.”

“Isn't that
great
?”

“That's just
great
!”

I
t's incalculable the number of times Raul Julia used that word to describe an event, a person, a feeling, or a thing. And he said it each time with genuine gusto and total commitment. Everything to Raul, it seemed, was
great
.

I may as well confess at the start that I was in love with him. If he were a Puerto Rican woman, he would have been called a spitfire. As a Puerto Rican man he was close to a bonfire and the heat he generated could have comfortably warmed a small country town.

Which, in fact, is where we met for the first time. It was the early 1960s at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, during its halcyon days under the leadership of an irrepressible Greek tyrant named Nikos Psacharopoulos. If you were welcomed into that family, you looked forward to the time in late June when you would throw some scripts, jeans, and a few packs of condoms into a bag and head north on the Taconic Parkway to tackle great roles in whirlwind productions and wrestle as many apprentices as you could into bed: male, female, or both, depending on your proclivities. To an apprentice, sex with an Equity actor was indeed, splendor in the grass. And most of us did as much mowing as the fresh pastures would allow. It was a glorious time to be in your twenties. For the next two decades carousing through the halls of the Adams Memorial Theater were, among others, Christopher Walken, Sam Waterston, Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Reeve, Raul, myself, and an equal number of our female contemporaries. Life in Williamstown for actors was idyllic. Serious work and serial sex.

Raul was a stunning young man. Indisputably masculine, with a strong, natural physique that never saw the inside of a gym. He had a massive head with a forest of luxurious, dark hair; his delicious accent, ready laugh, wide-open face with gigantic eyes, made him catnip to the girls. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, surrounded almost completely by women, he accepted their adoration as his birthright.

When he entered charmingly and sinuously into a room or onto a stage, temperatures rose. In this era when young male stars seem a sexless set of store-bought muscles set below interchangeable screw-top heads with faces of epic blandness—sheep trying to look like bulls—Raul defined real masculinity. His unself-conscious beauty was without compare and it was virtually impossible for him to be mistaken for any other man. If an errant seed of his had managed to fly to Spain on its own and find its way into a local woman, it would have impregnated the mother of today's only candidate for his crown, Javier Bardem.

Appropriately the summer we met in 1965, Raul was playing Mack the Knife in
The Threepenny Opera
, trying to be heard above the swoons that wafted through the audience and out onto the grass surrounding the theatre.

We spent only a few times together during that period and never shared the stage or an apprentice to my knowledge, but went about working our own territories.

It would be twenty years before our friendship began in earnest, when in 1984 George C. Scott cast us opposite each other and Jill Clayburgh in Noel Coward's
Design for Living
in New York. That was when I fell.

A
s we walked back to my apartment after the first day's read-through of our play, neither of us doing well in films at the time, he said:

“I'm living on loans.”

We each had a wife, two children, and a mortgage. We ate something at the kitchen table and talked about the play. My wife was not at home at the time, and in the back of the apartment my kids were laughing and playing in their rooms with a sitter. They were then three and one.

Somehow the conversation turned to underwear.

“I hate boxers,” he said. “There's too much material.”

“Well, I don't like briefs anymore,” I said. “Too confining.”

“Oh, well, I found these great ones. Not loose like boxers. They're like a bigger brief with a pouch. Come on, I'll show you.”

So into the bathroom we went and he dropped his pants and displayed them. They were indeed tighter than boxers, but lower on the thigh than briefs and designed with a comfortable and sexy pouch.

If he had already sensed I had a crush on him, he was completely unself-conscious and unbothered by our somewhat homoerotic moment. He may as well have been showing me a new tie. As he left my apartment, he said:

“I want us to be friends.”

“Me too,” I said.

D
esign for Living
was a big hit. During its run when we got together with our families, Raul landed somewhere on a couch, glass in hand, like an immovable stone Buddha, as the rest of us ran around preparing food, wrangling the kids, or cleaning up. His one contribution to the fray would be to hold out his arm, proffer his empty glass, confident that someone would fill it, and return to his leisure. Our children climbed all over him as if he were a human jungle gym and he was a wonderful pied piper until he'd had enough.

“Merel,” he called to his wife, “take them away.” And they were pulled off him like so many cuddling kittens. It was during that time I nicknamed him “Principessa.”

A
t least four nights a week, Raul and I went out alone together after the show and we usually ended up someplace where he was King. The maitre d' and the waiters would race around doing his bidding, and constantly filling his glass. Bottle after bottle of wine would be consumed followed by a good grappa or port. And at some point, he would rise up and sing, full voice, in his glorious tenor/baritone, to the delight of the stragglers.

Nothing of importance was ever discussed. I stayed sober. He got drunk. He was resolutely closed to any discussion of his addiction and there was no doubt in my mind that had I suggested he stop, our time together would have ended. When I finally got him home he would say at the door most nights in that irresistible accent:

“Good night, I love you—you are my boyfriend.”

Merel was always up, took him from me and put him to bed where he would remain late into the day. When the play closed, the nightly ritual ended but we stayed in touch.

O
n a Friday morning one winter weekend he called:

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You want to come to the farm with me and Barry? Just us.”

“Sure.”

So a few hours later Raul, myself, and our great friend Barry Primus drove to Raul's farm in upstate New York. Barry, who still, as of this writing, remains a close and dear friend, is an irrepressible guy with a compulsive and infectious personality that usually sets the tone for any gathering. And we three had a bachelor weekend of delicious relaxation.

“There's no food in the house,” Raul said. “We better stop and get some sandwiches.”

“Take me to the supermarket,” I said.

“I don't know where there is one.”

We asked around and found it. Raul peered into the market in wonder.

“This is
great
.”

We never bathed, nor made a bed or left the house the entire weekend. But it was clear to me that I would have to be the wife. Neither Barry nor Raul had a clue in the kitchen.

I cooked the entire weekend. When the dishes finally ran out I said:

“Raul you wash. Barry you dry.”

Standing at the sink, singing opera at the top of his lungs, he stopped and said:

“You know, Merel wants me to get her a dishwasher, but I'm not going to. This is
fun
.”

S
oon his career took off with
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, for which his costar, William Hurt, won the Oscar. Raul told me that one day in rehearsal, Hector Babenco, the director, asked him and Bill to switch roles as an experiment. It became clear each would be better suited to the other's part. “But Bill,” Raul told me “knew he had the greater role and resisted the change.”

“I should have played his part,” he said, “but I couldn't have done it.”

“Why not?”

“It would have been impossible for me to play a
maricón
.”

His Puerto Rican background would have made his playing an openly gay man unacceptable to his family. But he was genuinely happy for Bill when he won the Oscar for his performance.

I
t was during this period that Raul fell under the spell of Werner Erhard and the
est
movement, something I found hilariously absurd. Another guru, another fad appealing to emotional masochists. Following a visit one afternoon to Erhard's backstage dressing room after watching him perform, I spoke vehemently on the way home about what a charlatan I thought he was.

“All I know,” said Raul, “is that the more money I give him, the more money I earn.”

I kept hammering him about the negative aspects.

“I just don't see what you see,” I said.

“That's because you see where you're
at
,” he barked.

I
n the early 1990s I moved my family to L.A. and Raul and I drifted apart again for a time. But we had begun a telephone ritual that we kept up until his death. My phone would ring no matter where I was and it would be Raul.

“Do you know what I said today?”

He was calling me from halfway around the world on a film location.

“What?” I said in earnest anticipation.

“I was on a horse and I had to say to Mel Gibson, ‘Get out of town or I'll kill you!' ”

Then I would tell him some ludicrous piece of dialogue I had uttered.

And he would start laughing helplessly in his little-boy giggle, “Oh, that's
great,
” and we'd hang up.

O
ne night he appeared backstage at a play I was doing at the Music Centre in downtown Los Angeles. My boyfriend was back and we picked up as of old. At dinner he did not drink, ate very little, and was less than communicative. As I was driving him back to his hotel, he said:

“Stop the car, fast,” quickly got out and became sick on the sidewalk. As he was bent over, his hands on his knees, I rubbed his shoulder and said:

“Was it my performance?”

“Something I ate.”

I called the next day.

“I'm
great
,” he said.

A
gain time passed. In 1994, I was preparing to leave for Malta to start a film. One day the phone rang.

“I'm here. Come and see me.”

At eight o'clock that evening I drove to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and had dinner with the ghost of Raul Julia. He was probably less than one hundred pounds, pale, weak, and subdued. Barry Primus joined us and while we had room service, Raul ate from containers of macrobiotic food. There was no discussion of his illness.

After dinner Barry left and I said to Raul:

“I want to tell you something. A few months ago, I awoke in the middle of the night. I was not dreaming and I was not hallucinating but there were three angels floating over my wife's head—three amorphous golden creatures who peacefully floated above her for one minute or two and then wafted past me and out into the night. As they sailed over me, one beautiful face looked into my eyes and without words said: ‘
It's time that you believe in us.
' ”

R
aul listened in silence—but said nothing. We talked about other things and I left. I knew that he was leaving the next morning at 10 a.m. At 7 a.m. I awoke with a start, got dressed, took down a copy of a book I had bought on angels after my experience, inscribed it to Raul and drove to his hotel. He opened the door and said “Hi” as if he had expected me. I gave him the book—“Great,” he said. We ate breakfast together in silence, then he put down his fork, looked at me, and said:

“I have been thinking about your angel story. I have been thinking about all the people sitting on the mountaintops waiting to see something—anything—some proof. You haven't got a spiritual bone in your body—but this fucking angel comes and appears to
you
. It is just
great
.”

He was up on his feet gesticulating, passionate, happy for me. We embraced, made a promise not to lose track of each other again, and I took him downstairs and put him in the limo. He was sitting on the edge of the backseat as I stood by the door holding onto his hand. I leaned in to kiss him good-bye; he then slowly moved his emaciated body back into the darkness and disappeared from my sight. When I closed the door and turned into the unforgiving California sunlight, I knew it would be the last time I'd see him. We spoke a week later.

“I read the angel book,” he said. “It was
great.
”