Dropped Names (23 page)

We took a cab to a local restaurant to discuss it. I rode in the front, and when we arrived, Arthur, in his enthusiasm, jumped out and slammed the door just as Inge was about to step out.

“Arzhaa, Arzhaa,” she said, “you slammed ze door on me.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. I thought you were getting out on the other side.”

“Vhy vould I vant to get out into ze traffic?” she said.

T
he play was being very well received during previews, and Arthur's spirits soared.

“Maybe enough time has passed,” he said. “Maybe now they'll see.” He was as jubilant as I had ever seen him. Not enough, however, to pick up any of the restaurant checks, which was, after all, true to form.

As we got closer to opening, emboldened by the audience's response, I made one last plea for an epiphany from Quentin. No luck.

“Well, would it be okay if Maggie slapped him?”

“Why?”

“Well, don't you think
somebody
should?”

To his credit, he laughed and said, “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

T
he slap didn't help. Not to mention the fact that on opening night Arthur, the man who'd promised to “stay away,” sat himself in the fifth row center of a small off-Broadway theatre, dominating the room. I rarely recall an opening night in which an audience sat as still and quiet as that one. When he came backstage, he said: “Tough crowd.”

And I said, “Arthur, what do you expect? You were sitting smack dab in the middle. Everyone knew you were there.” He seemed utterly oblivious to how inhibited the audience must have felt by his presence.

The next day, the reviews once again were critical of the lack of introspection in the central character I'd asked Arthur to investigate. And it was dismissed, once more, as Arthur Miller dancing on the grave of Marilyn Monroe. I called him late in the morning.

“They'll never forgive me,” he said.

We ran for several months and closed having made not much more than a minor ripple. Arthur lived on for twenty more years. It was in that time that we shared many evenings out. I'm sure Inge's no-nonsense German stoicism must have appealed greatly to Arthur after Marilyn. The fact that Arthur was Jewish and Inge German added to the banter between them. Arthur would often say how he hated “cultural Jews—what a waste of a life,” he said. “All that deep intellectualizing.”

“We Germans don't have that problem,” Inge said.

“No, you don't,” Arthur said. “And Germany is a great country to die in.”

I
nge predeceased Arthur and, not long after, he began his relationship with Agnes Barley.

One evening as we were having dinner at Café Luxembourg on West 70th Street, Arthur was doodling on the paper tablecloth. After he finished, I said, “Would you sign and date that for me?” He did. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

“What are you going to do with that?” he said.

“I'm going to keep it and, when you're dead, I'm going to auction it off,” I joked.

“Make sure you send a cut to my estate.”

I still have the doodle, but I doubt auctioning it off would bring me a return on the monies spent feeding him over the years. His multimillion-dollar estate will just have to do without another dividend.

My futile efforts to get Arthur Miller to reveal the soul of his most biographical character fell on ears most likely deaf to anything but praise and adulation. My guess is he met his match in Marilyn Monroe, a troubled woman who most certainly needed a man with an available heart.

D
uring his final decade, Arthur was not shy of accepting public tributes. The one I found most fascinating was an evening in which I watched him sitting on a dais, staring straight ahead, as his sister, Joan, sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” to a packed house. When she got to the lyric “I'll sing to him, each spring to him, and worship the trousers that cling to him,” I thought, well, why not. This was a man who, it seemed all his life, had courted and enjoyed worship. A man who, as a boy, had after all been given the nickname
God
.

ANNE BANCROFT

T
he most common cliché used to describe members of my profession is “Actors are babies.” There are, of course, exceptions, but I would say the vast majority of us fit that description, with perhaps one additional adjective: “Actors are
angry
babies.”

And I knew of no baby angrier than little Anna Maria Italiano, known to the world as Anne Bancroft; an elegant moniker about as suited to her as Cuddles would have been to Adolf Hitler.

W
e first met in the summer of 1966 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was to star as Sabina in a production of Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth
, to be directed by Arthur Penn. Having been guided by Arthur to an Oscar-winning performance for Bill Gibson's
The Miracle Worker
and two Tonys—one for the play of the same title and the other for her Broadway debut in Bill's
Two for the Seesaw
, opposite Henry Fonda—she was at the top of her game, thirty-five years old, beautiful, funny, and angry. She died thirty-eight years later, still beautiful, funny, and angry.

I spoke at Annie's memorial service in New York, along with, among others, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Patty Duke, and Sidney Lumet. A week or two later, Mel Brooks, her husband, rang and asked if we could meet. It took us a while, but we finally managed dinner together in California, and I asked him how he was doing. “Still trying to please Annie,” he joked, but neither of us laughed.

She was, indeed, just about impossible to please, and that flaw in her often obliterated the loving, warm, and fiercely loyal friend she was to those of us who tried hard to weather her storms.

It was the unpredictability of those storms that could lull you into a sense that perhaps time had mellowed her. Like sand suddenly rising to a fury in a benign desert, she could go from zero to sixty in as many seconds; her voice, body, and demeanor becoming lethal weapons deployed without reservation or discretion.

Potentially one of the greatest actresses of her generation, she was consumed by a galloping narcissism that often undermined her talents and forced her back into the persona of the little Italian girl she was; dancing on street corners near her birthplace on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and smiling for the customers.

She told me one day of a woman who stopped her on a street and said, “Hey Annie, I love your work.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But don't smile so much, honey.”

She also told me of a day she was walking through Bloomingdale's, stopped to smell some perfume at a counter, looked up, and saw a woman across the way smiling at her. She smiled back. The other woman returned hers with an even broader smile. And Annie said she felt inextricably drawn to this woman, wanting to go around the counter to embrace and kiss her passionately, until she realized she was looking into a mirror.

But in the summer of 1966, none of her narcissism was as yet disturbing, or even noticeable to my twenty-eight-year-old adoring eyes. She, Mel, my girlfriend, and I became virtually inseparable friends. “Hey Mibby [Annie's nickname for Mel], these are the two kids I told you about from my show.” The four of us spent almost every waking hour together, beginning that summer in Stockbridge, then in New York, Fire Island, and holidays for the next five years.

O
ur first summer together, after performances, we'd gather almost every night around a large table on a sunporch at the home of the playwright William Gibson and his wife, a renowned psychiatrist named Margaret Brenman, who was practicing at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge. Those gatherings, peopled occasionally with the likes of the actress Kim Stanley, theater director Harold Clurman, and the Penns, were about as full of consistently riotous laughter as any I have ever known. Led by Mel, they were stupendous evenings of improvised insanity. I can still see Mel standing before us, singing “You're My Everything” to his imaginary penis, which grew larger and larger as he first took it in one hand, then both, flung it over his shoulder, wrapped it around his neck, tripped on it, and slowly began to roll it back in as if it were a garden hose on a storage wheel. Annie's hopeless, helpless laughter made it even funnier, and up she'd get, put on the music, and dance for us.

T
he production of
Skin of Our Teeth
was a giant success and sold out mostly due to her box office draw. Following that summer, Bill Gibson wrote a play entitled
A Cry of Players
, in which I would play young Will Shakespeare and Annie his wife, Anne Hathaway. It was to be directed by Gene Frankel. We first performed it at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 1967. Will was unquestionably the leading role, with Anne a strong support. She was doing the play because she felt a deep loyalty to Bill for
Two for the Seesaw
and
The Miracle Worker
.

After the first preview performance in Stockbridge, there was a note in my mailbox that at the second performance the order of the curtain calls would be changed. Annie had had the last call, with me preceding her. But from then on it would be reversed, with me taking the final bow.

I went to her dressing room, truly chagrined at the turn of events, and protested that I couldn't do such a thing. She was a big star, I was the new kid on the block, blah blah blah. She was putting on her makeup, brushing her hair, and generally avoiding my gaze in the mirror as I stood over her protesting. Finally she said:

“That's the way it's gonna be, Frankie. You got the bigger hand last night. It's your show, and I'm gonna look like the gracious star giving it up to the new guy. Now get the fuck out of here and let me get dressed.”

So on she sailed, took her bow, turned, and flung both her arms out to the wings and presented me with a giant smile to the audience. There was no price to pay in our friendship, and a valuable lesson to be learned in how to understand and survive the playing field.

We then took the play to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York where it was only moderately well received, but enough to keep us in the safety of an institutional theatre for a limited run.

A
cting with Annie was another valuable lesson for me. Prone to the theatrical as I was, she helped by example guide me to a deeper, more truthful performance. She played for moment-to-moment honesty, never a gesture or a line reading just for its theatrical value only, and she had an unerring sense of comedy, nursing every laugh she could find. There was, however, one moment in the play that she played with her eyes oddly placed. Somewhere in the second act, when it becomes clear that young Will is going to leave Anne for good, she says to him a line something like: “I love ya, Will. Don'tcha know that? I love ya.”

Annie played it with heartbreaking honesty every night, her voice quivering, eyes welling with tears, standing about two feet from me. But she resolutely never looked into my eyes, rather focused deeply on the second button down of my shirt. I never asked her until well after we'd closed why she'd done that, and when I did she said, matter-of-factly:

“Oh, that's about where Mel comes up to on you.”

T
he play closed, having been personally quite successful for me, and she sent me a note at the final performance that read: “Congratulations Frankie. You've arrived! Now you're just another banana in the bunch.” Her pragmatic advice did not stop there. When I was in Paris making a movie, I wrote to her jokingly that I was the toast of the town. She responded by telling me that too often a piece of toast can become a pile of crumbs. And when I was particularly miserable on another project, she wrote this: “Don't be afraid to fall on the floor and cry when you're unhappy, Frankie. Someone will pick you up. And if nobody's there, eventually you'll pick yourself up.”

A
nnie and Mel owned a townhouse on West 10th Street in New York, and my girlfriend and I lived in a four-flight walk-up on 61st Street and Third Avenue, for which we paid the exorbitant rent of $70.04 a month. For the next few years we lived a best friends' life between the two places; daily phone calls, long late night visits to each other's homes, takeout, endless games of Scrabble, cards, charades, and trips away to exotic beach locations. They willingly climbed the four flights to our modest rabbit warren of an apartment, and we made an equal number of visits to their luxurious Village townhouse.

Annie was enjoying great success during this period, with several TV specials, starring roles in films, and, of course, her signature performance as Mrs. Robinson in
The Graduate
.

Pure coincidence caused us to rent a house together in Los Angeles while she was shooting that film. I was cast in
The Devils
, the first production of the just-built Mark Taper Forum at the Downtown Music Center in Los Angeles, and the four of us took a house on a street in Beverly Hills called Bunting Way. Mel came out on weekends while he was editing his first movie,
The Producers
, and it was in that house that I began to see patterns in Annie's behavior that would rule her life and that she seemed never able to conquer.

Most evenings she, my girl, and I had dinner together after her day's shoots and before I would leave to do my show. Those meals were filled with set stories about the young Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, and Mike Nichols.

“Mike's giving them most of the attention. He knows I don't need it, but the kids are really nervous. Dustin's got a lot of balls. Scared shitless but he'll try anything. Mike stuffs a handkerchief in his mouth to keep from laughing at him and ruining a take, but I don't think he's that funny. We did a scene where he's gotta come over and kiss me impulsively. I'd just taken a puff on a cigarette, and Mike said: ‘Hold in the smoke while he's kissing you and blow it out after he lets you go.' I thought it was a stupid idea, so I just blew the smoke out thinking, ‘This is a stupid idea.' ”

One night she said: “Well, Dustin's not
that
nervous. We did the scene in bed and he was as hard as a rock . . . Short Jewish guys.”

“By the way,” I asked, “does Mrs. Robinson have a first name?”

“Yeah,” she said without hesitation. “Queenie!”

T
oward the end of the shoot, Annie had an accident on the set during the church scene. Doctors were called, an ambulance arrived and it took her back to the Bunting house. Up the driveway she came, ambulance lights blaring, with Mike and Dustin behind in another car. Both jumped out looking terrified and worried. As she was being carried upstairs to her room, Mike told me that she had fallen over backward while shooting that day. X-rays were taken, pills dispensed, and she took to her bed for a few days.

It would be an event that in one form or another took place on most every project Annie did through the years. It was her back, or her throat, or her legs, and always there would be panic, pills, tears, and bed rest.

One night at the Bunting house, I saw her give in to those fears in a profound way. Arthur Penn stopped by to say hello, and we sat in the living room talking until Annie returned from the set. When she arrived, still in Mrs. Robinson's makeup, looking just gorgeous, she joined us. She made a drink and launched into a description of the scene she had just shot. It was the hotel bar, where Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin meet clandestinely and then go upstairs to a room.

At about 11 p.m., the phone rang in the den. I took it.

“Frank. Hi, it's Mike. Is Annie still up?”

“Yes, she's right here.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Annie!” I called out. “It's Mike.”

As she came toward me in the den, I saw a look on her face I can only describe as hostile panic. I gave her the phone, quickly left the room, and closed the door.

A few minutes later, she came out in a rage.

“Jesus, fuck. The fucking film got destroyed and we gotta do it again. They're still set up. I gotta go back. Fuck.”

She grabbed her drink, went to her bag, fished around for a pill bottle, took out two Valium, and chugged.

“I'm not gonna be able to get it again like I did.”

“Sure you will,” Arthur said. “Forget what you did and do it fresh.”

“What the fuck,” she said. “Mike's only watching Dusty anyway.”

She sat down in an armchair to wait for her car, and spat out a series of slights she felt she'd endured during the shoot and then began to sob uncontrollably, like a little girl who'd been told by her mother to stand in the corner before she could explain that whatever had happened was not her fault. Arthur, who had seen her through two plays and that Oscar-winning performance in
The Miracle Worker
, was brilliantly sympathetic and comforting. The car came, she went, reshot the scene, and the result was and is superb.

A
nnie would again work with Mike and George C. Scott in Lillian Hellman's
The Little Foxes
for Lincoln Center, a role for which she was totally unsuited, and again she would cover her anxiety with an imperious disdain. My girl, whom Annie managed to have understudy Maria Tucci, playing her daughter, told me that at the dress parade, as Annie stood on the stage in full regalia, nobody was paying attention. Finally, in a thunderous voice, she shouted out across the footlights, “Well?”