Dropped Names (24 page)

There was a deafening silence and Mike said:

“I'm not sure about your eyebrows.”

“Yeah!” she said, “I know. They've held me back,” and stormed off.

A
s the years passed, Mel's career zoomed higher. He won an Oscar for
The Producers
, but Annie had not gone with him to the ceremony. When his name was announced, she called our apartment in New York from their house in the Village.

“Oh Jesus, Frankie,” she said, “he won. I was scared he wouldn't. I couldn't face it.”

I
n 1969, she accompanied Mel to Yugoslavia, where we shot his second film, and my first:
The Twelve Chairs
. She was a great and loving pal throughout the shoot, warming my feet in the dressing room when I'd come in from the cold, watching dailies, giving great notes to Dom DeLuise and me and generally keeping everybody's spirits up. I had ended the relationship with my long-term girlfriend before filming began and Annie mothered me through an on-set affair.

The Twelve Chairs
and
A Cry of Players
also ended my working relationship with Anne and Mel. But our friendship continued on for another twenty-four years. In that time they became fabulously wealthy, holding on to their house in Fire Island, buying another beach house in Malibu, an apartment in New York, and building a magnificent seventeen-thousand-square-foot home on La Mesa Drive, one of the most beautiful streets in Santa Monica. I married in 1977, had two children, and Annie gave birth to their one child, Max. A huge phalanx of assistants, nannies, gardeners, and secretaries looked after their every need.

Lifestyle was now a dominant factor in her life. A multitiered garden, trips to London (“Max needs silk underwear,” she'd laugh), and purchasing fine art became all-important to her. She ventured onto Broadway with not much success in William Gibson's
Golda
and other plays, but the conditions had to be perfect, the roles central, and the director and other actors needed to pay homage or she'd fly into a rage, at one point famously throwing a full cup of coffee at an actress who'd disagreed with her. Everyone, she felt, was either intimidated by her, jealous of her, or not talented enough to keep pace.

O
ne day, she called and asked me to come over and read a Shakespeare play with her.

“Olivier wants me to join some company he's forming,” she said.

We read it out loud and she grew increasingly irritated.

“I don't get it,” she said. “I just don't get it.”

Finally she took the script, tore it in half, and flung it across the room.

“Fuck it. No way I'm doing this shit.”

T
he narcissism did not abate as she grew older, and her need to control her environment became more and more stultifying to me. One night in a Malibu restaurant the dam broke. It was 1991; I'd moved my family to Los Angeles earlier that year. We fell into a reminiscence of our time in the 1960s, and the fun we'd all had at the Bunting house. I started to tell my wife the story of the late night phone call from Mike Nichols, Annie's anger, then fear, and her drowning two Valium with a glass of Scotch. I pointed out how wonderful Arthur Penn had been with her, and how she'd gone back to the set to do the scene perfectly again. There was complete silence as I spoke, and Annie stared at me incredulously, storm clouds gathering. The sound of the waves outside were then muted by her furious explosion.

“That never happened,” she said. “What the fuck are you talking about? It never happened!”

The voice was gaining in power and volume.

“Annie,” I said, still easy, “Arthur was there. You went back to the set and did a great scene.”

“It's a fucking lie, Frankie,” she said, and flung her napkin across the table into my face. “I know it probably makes a great story for you to tell your friends, but . . .”

And all the years of accommodating her rages finally overwhelmed me, and I said, in full voice, like a bad movie when other diners stop and stare, things I shouldn't have said, ending with a bitter insult that was out of my mouth before I could censor it:

“And it's not even a good story I tell to my friends, Annie. Nobody cares about Anne Bancroft stories anymore.”

And I was gone, out into the Malibu night. My wife chased after me as I found our car and had to endure an hour of ranting on the drive home. When we arrived, the phone was ringing. It was Annie and her apology was typically non-introspective and self-serving.

“I've been going through a rough time lately,” she said.

I was unsympathetic, getting off the phone as quickly as I could.

Our friendship never fully recovered. In 1995 I sold the house in California, divorced, and moved back to New York. Annie and Mel loyally came to every play I was in, saw every movie, and endured some inappropriate love affairs, but that night in Malibu was a death knell for the thirty years of intimate togetherness.

A
nd when the death knell of cancer sounded inside her body, she managed to keep it a secret from most of her friends. She did not reach out to me in her final years, and I was unaware of the extent of her illness until one afternoon in June 2005 when my phone rang. I was shooting a film entitled
Superman Returns
, and living forty miles outside of Sydney, Australia, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a friend calling.

“I'm really, really sorry about Anne Baxter,” he said.

“What do you mean,” I said.

“Oh, I mean Anne Bancroft. She died.”

After we hung up, I opened the French doors to the patio and walked out listening to the Pacific, remembering the night thousands of miles across it in Malibu that I had thrown away a close relationship with a woman who could be so funny, warm, and smart, but a friend I could no longer endure. Any relationship in which one party feels even the slightest sense of diminishment had become for me a relationship not worth enduring. I did not so much regret my decision to pull away from her ultimately corrosive aura as I did bemoan the demons that held sway inside her; they becoming the friends she most listened to and believed.

I have never asked Mel if Annie found some respite during her illness in her final years. I'm not certain I want to hear the answer.

MAUREEN STAPLETON

I
mplicit in Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
is the notion that physiognomy is destiny.

By her own admission, Maureen Stapleton was fat and homely and needed to “become somebody else” to survive. The somebody else she would become in her first film,
Lonelyhearts
, would be a fat, homely woman. It was 1958. She was thirty-two and she would get an Oscar nomination for her performance. Already a star in the Broadway theatre by 1950, playing Serafina in Tennessee Williams's
The Rose Tattoo
, another fat, homely woman, this time in love with a truck driver, she won a Tony for her performance.

In Mo's case, the Wilde reference was sadly prophetic, but she was not someone for whom I ever felt sorry. She was tough, funny, shrewd, talented, unsentimental, and not without sex or love. She married a guy named Max Allentuck, had two kids, a ten-year affair with the eighty-year-old Broadway producer/director George Abbott when she was in her forties, and married again after that. A lusty Irish lass.

She finally, after four nominations, won an Oscar for
Reds
in 1982, but “so what,” as she was fond of saying of just about anything. Famous for her fear of flying, she almost didn't get that Oscar, needing to get to the location in Europe by boat and back.

W
e were never close friends, despite the many times I spent in her company. There would invariably come a point when she passed into a place that I found repellent and I slipped away from the party or the actors' hangout. She did not inspire in me the need to protect or save her; but more the desire to take her by the shoulders and shake her like a beer can until it exploded. Had I tried it though, she most likely would have attempted castration.

Ditzy though she may have appeared, she was nobody's patsy.

When a young actress kept upstaging her in a play's previews, she did nothing. One day when a friend who'd been to see the show mentioned it to her and asked:

“What are you doing about it?”

She replied, “I'm killing the cunt with kindness.”

A
nd she could be outrageously and irreverently funny.

At a wrap party for the movie
Bye Bye Birdie
, which would introduce the luscious eighteen-year-old Ann-Margret to the world, she sat through a bunch of speeches from the director, producers, and studio heads paying tribute to her and costars Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh. All of them spent an inordinate amount of time praising Ann-Margret's talents and predicting a stunning future for her. Mo got up to the microphone and said: “Well, I guess I'm the only one here who doesn't wanna fuck Ann-Margret.”

M
y personal favorite is a drunken ride home she had with the agent Milton Goldman. Openly gay and openly alcoholic, he was a mainstay in the New York theatrical community. The story goes that on a rainy night in winter, they were returning from an event, drinking heavily in the back of a limo and singing Irish folk songs at the top of their lungs. When the car door opened at Mo's townhouse, they tumbled out into the gutter laughing hysterically. As the driver picked them up, put Milton back in the car, and dropped Mo at her door, she is reported to have called back to him:

“Milton, I love you! If you ever want to fuck a woman, I'm your man!”

I
had my own drunken rainy night with her as well, which did not end with much hilarity.

We shared a stage at the New School one evening discussing various approaches to acting for an invited audience. She was totally sober and brilliant. Her basic advice: “You gotta mean it baby.” No artifice, no method or system. Just be honest and do it. And she resisted all attempts from a questioner to idealize her or the profession. A good, solid, talented woman who could not be drawn into preciousness or mystery. “I'm a worker,” she said.

We were deposited in the back of a limo. It was pouring down rain, the traffic was brutal, and we both needed to be dropped far uptown.

“Geez, I'm not gonna make this ride, Frank. Hey, driver, around the corner is a place I know. Pull up there.”

She jumped out in the rain before he could come round to her door with an umbrella and ran in. Fifteen minutes later, she returned, visibly altered and carrying a carafe of white wine and two glasses. All three were tightly covered with plastic wrap and filled to the brim. She got in, handed me one glass, put the carafe between her legs, and told the driver to stay still for a few minutes as she delicately uncovered her glass, brought it slowly to her mouth, and sipped its contents so as not to lose one drop. For the rest of the trip we rode in bumper-to-bumper traffic as she consumed her glass, mine, and the full carafe.

With each block, she grew more incoherent and scattered, but still funny. She was then appearing in
The Little Foxes
on Broadway with Elizabeth Taylor, whom she adored.

“She thinks that shit Burton loves her,” she said. “Boy, everybody and his cousin came to see Elizabeth in that turkey.”

Of Betty Bacall, with whom she worked, she said, “I stay out of her way till they feed her.”

By the time we reached her house she needed my help getting out of the car, finding the key to the door, and going up the stairs. I left her leaning on her banister looking down at me as I returned to the front door. When I turned back she had sunk to the floor and was out like a light.

When riding in the back of the car with her earlier that night, at some point I started talking about our work; the endurance a life in the theater needs, the concentration it takes, and the insecurities of being an actor. Lying with her head back on the seat, the glasses and carafe empty on the floor at her feet, she looked over at me and said, “Who gives a
fuck
!”

WILLIAM STYRON

“W
hat can you say about a man?” Marlene Dietrich once intoned in an Orson Welles film entitled
A Touch of Evil
.

I can't say much about Bill Styron. But what I can say, I think most men will understand and all women indulge.

R
eading his obituary in November 2006 brought back a lazy afternoon at the Pierre Hotel in New York sometime in the mid-1970s. It was the only time he and I would ever meet. We did not look into each other's eyes, we did not even shake hands, but I certainly took his measure.

That particular day, I was happily making love to a luscious young French woman. The Pierre was where our clandestine liaisons always occurred and always in the afternoons. Our affair had been going on for several years, starting in Paris where we met, then in Los Angeles, New York, the South of France, the Italian Riviera, anywhere our work schedules and her other liaisons would allow. This lady collected lovers the way most women collect shoes and she had very little interest in either the institution of marriage or the practice of monogamy. She was a sexual outlaw and I was very happy to be another notch on her garter belt for as long as she'd let me.

Contrary to belief, women do talk. This one certainly did. Her reminiscences were vivid, explicit, and detailed, and her adventures were worth listening to: a British actor, at the top of our profession at the time, gay before she brought him across. An heir to a food chain fortune, impotent until she found the key to restore his manhood. Actors, athletes, rock stars, politicians—all had entered her pearly gates and found salvation. And, oh, yes, writers too.

As the lady was running a hot bath, I picked up her see-through negligee and, for a gag, slid naked into it. It flowed to the floor on her, but on me just made it to the knees. I reached around to grab the sash and tie it but felt a large double knot on one end. I was beginning to pick at it as she came into the bedroom.

“Oh no, dahlink! Don't do dat! Dat's Bill's knot.”

“What?”

“Bill Styron. He put it dere! It's de size of his cock. He told me to tell my next lover to say hello for him.”

“
The
Bill Styron?” I asked, holding his message in my hands.

“Yes dahlink!”

“Pulitzer Prize winner? Author of
Confessions of Nat Turner
?”

“Yes dahlink!”

“Hard or soft?”

“I don't remember!”

It certainly didn't weigh very much, and I let it drop, slipped off the negligee, and hit the shower. But once the soap was in my hand, I began to wonder. So I went back into the bedroom, while she luxuriated in her bath, to test possibly more dangerous waters.

She could have been joking, of course. Mr. Styron could have put the knot anywhere he chose and I could have not picked up the gauntlet. But there I stood mauling and measuring myself against a man I had never met, with whom I had little in common, but who had succeeded in baiting me into a futile and childish competition. Having satisfied myself that we were, like the majority of men on this planet, equal, at least in adolescent behavior, I undid the knot and retied it to my own specifications, perhaps just coming in a stroke above par. Later as we sat down to our meal, I told her I'd taken his challenge.

“Ouf! You men!” she said. “What does it matter?”

S
adly, this enchanting creature left the planet in 2011, leaving a great many men the better for her lack of interest in their penis size. It profoundly stopped mattering to Mr. Styron at the time of his passing. There is, I suppose, something to be said for dropping dead before it does.