Outside Looking In (10 page)

I asked, then, how he could afford to hire George C. Scott for the role of the religious father who seeks his straying daughter. Scott had been a big star after he played General Patton in 1970. Schrader explained that Scott was in one of his heavy drinking phases, increasingly hard to insure. Schrader was warned that if he let him get started on a bottle, he would probably not finish the picture. Late one afternoon, there was just one scene that had to be finished before they moved to a new location. Setting the lights was taking a long time, so Scott went to his trailer. When at last the set was ready, Schrader sent for Scott, but the messenger returned and said he would not come. Fearing the worst, Schrader went to the trailer and found Scott with a half-emptied bottle. The director pleaded with him to come out for just one quick scene, the last chance to get the segment finished.

Scott was surly. “I should never have agreed to do this picture. It is a shitty picture, and you are a shitty director.” Schrader humored him, and kept pleading. At last Scott said he would go back out on one condition only—that Schrader promise never to direct another picture, for the good of the movie industry. Schrader solemnly promised, to get the thing done. Years later, Scott spotted Schrader in a Los Angeles restaurant, stomped over, slapped down a
Variety
with news of Schrader's new picture, and said, “You promised never to direct again.” Schrader was astonished that he remembered out of his alcoholic mist. He said: “What can I say, George? I lied.”

Schrader asked me to do another interview-on-stage event in the East, but I had a different engagement at the time. Then he invited me to see him film a movie in Toronto. The two of us had dinner at an Italian restaurant on the night of my arrival in Canada. One of the first things he asked was, “Do you still go to church?” I answered, “Yes. Do you?” “Yes, but my father would not count it as really going to church. We attend Episcopalian services.” Then he told me about the film he was making,
Forever Mine.
It was an old script he had sold years ago. Since the studio did not use it, he bought it back—resenting the interest he had to pay for the intervening years. In the story, a gangster (Ray Liotta) marries a young woman (Gretchen Mol), takes her to Miami, and then neglects her as he gambles. She meets a young beachcomber (Joseph Fiennes) and spends the night in his cabin. When Liotta finds out about this, he has his gang beat and mutilate Fiennes. Sixteen years later, Fiennes, who has had cosmetic surgery and become a gangster himself, goes back to get revenge. Schrader said he was having trouble with Fiennes, who had contracted for this movie before the release of his 1998 hit,
Shakespeare in Love.
He had arrived on the new set with a badly swollen ego, was demanding changes in the script, and generally acting like a spoiled brat.

I asked Schrader about his relations with Martin Scorsese. After great success as a director-writer team (
Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ
), they had a noisy breakup. Schrader said that Scorsese had insisted he be listed as co-scenarist and have the right to change Schrader's scripts. Friends had tried to bring them back together, and after a time they had a tense lunch meeting at which Scorsese promised not to make a single change if Schrader would do a script from the real-life story
Bringing Out the Dead.
Schrader agreed, and Scorsese was making the film in New York even as Schrader made his movie in Canada. I asked if Scorsese was keeping to his agreement. Schrader said he knew that he was because his (Schrader's) wife, Mary Beth Hurt, was acting as the nurse in
Bringing Out,
and she assured him that the script was being observed exactly.

A handsome young man had been eavesdropping on our conversation in the restaurant, and after his dinner he came over, gave Schrader his card, and said he was an actor and would like to audition for Schrader. After he left, Schrader flipped me the card and said, “Look at its credits. He is not an actor. He's a model.”

The next day, on the set, I saw what Schrader meant about Fiennes. He was being fitted with a wig and he objected to all the models being given him. The dramatic time of his meeting with Mol was the early 1970s, when men wore their hair long. He did not want that. Schrader kept explaining that his look had to be different from the time of his reappearance in the late 1980s. What did he want? He wanted to wear his own short hair in both eras. The discussion was going nowhere. Schrader came over and whispered that Fiennes might be showing off with a writer on the set, could I step outside for a while?

I went out and talked with one of my heroes, John Bailey, the great director of photography for Schrader's masterpiece,
Mishima,
which is full of dazzling camera effects in both color and black-and-white. Before he did Mishima, he did Schrader's
American Gigolo
and
Cat People,
so he knew the man's habits well and enjoyed working with him. I asked Bailey about a film released at the same time as
Mishima,
Laurence Kasdan's
Silverado,
another tour de force of Bailey's lighting. Bailey would go on to make many fine movies (like
As Good As It Gets
). We shared enthusiasms for directors, past and present, cooling our heels while Fiennes threw his tantrum. After almost half an hour, Schrader came out, and we asked if he had made any progress with the temperamental star. He shook his head dejectedly.

When I met with Schrader a year later, I asked if Fiennes had ever become cooperative. He said he had not, and the morale of the whole team suffered because of it. The movie never did take off. Though it was shown in Spanish and Japanese theaters, no distributor was found for an American release. It went straight to television. Schrader's other film of 1998,
Bringing Out the Dead,
did run in theaters, but it was not a success. I asked Schrader why. “It should have been a gritty little picture, like
Mean Streets.
But Marty cannot do anything small anymore. He has a big entourage he must support, and he needs big stars. The hero of this movie is an emergency ambulance attendant who burns out young because of all the horrors he witnesses. Marty cast Nick Cage in the role, who was too old. He used the wrong music—music from our
Taxi Driver
days. The whole tone was wrong.” I asked whatever happened to Joe Fiennes. He shrugged, “Not much.” It has been mainly downhill for him since the brief glory of
Shakespeare in Love.

When I moved to Evanston in 1980, my principal contact with the movies was through Dick Cusack. Though his children are the actors best known to the public, Dick appeared in nineteen movies himself, wrote one of them (
Jack Bull
), and wrote and acted in plays for the Piven Theatre Workshop, the Evanston institution where all the Cusack children trained as actors—Johnny, Joanie, Annie, Susie, and Billy (to give them their Evanston family names). Since Dick often played judges in the movies, he was a natural for the part of Pontius Pilate in our church's annual Lenten enactment of the Passion of Christ. I was always amused by the fact that the director of this event got all her other actors to memorize their parts, but Dick—the only professional in the group—refused to do that. He just read it straight from the Bible.

One of the movies where Dick played a judge was
Eight Men Out
, with his son John and Chicagoan Studs Terkel in the cast, which led to a three-way friendship. I brought Studs and Joan Cusack to my American Studies class to talk about movie-making. (I would have brought Dick, but he had died by then.) The Cusack home was on a park beside Lake Michigan, and every Thanksgiving during Dick's lifetime the family and friends played a game of touch football in the park. Dick, who was on the championship basketball team at Holy Cross with Bob Cousy, had back troubles that kept him from playing, but he served as referee, making up creative penalties, such as “Five yards for calling a stupid play.” Dick's wit never deserted him. When he was dying of cancer, and his son John asked if there was someone he wanted to see before he died, he answered, “Yeah. Ava Gardner.” John and Joan both left the movies they were making to spend their father's last months with him. John took him to the Mayo Clinic and other places to see if there was any way the cancer could be arrested. John told me that when one medication caused diarrhea, Dick came out of the bathroom saying, “That was the most massive evacuation since Dunkirk.” At Dick's funeral, after the service in our campus church, the pianist was called up, and John said to the congregation, “Don't think we're being irreverent. This is what Dad asked to be played.” The pianist launched into “Ain't Misbehavin' ” by Fats Waller.

W
hen I met Natalie, my wife-to-be, one of the first things we learned about each other was that we love opera. We did not agree on everything. Among tenors, I preferred Beniamino Gigli while she liked Giuseppe di Stefano. I later learned that Luciano Pavarotti and his tenor father had the same split, the father staying with Gigli while his son defected to di Stefano. Most of the time, though, Natalie's and my tastes were in accord. When we were dating, we could go in from New Haven to New York on Saturdays and line up for standing-room tickets at the Old Met, both matinee and evening performances. After the afternoon show, I would take up a position in the night line while she bought sandwiches and brought them for us to eat as we waited. After the evening performance, we took a late train back to New Haven.

Standing in those lines was a real education, since the devotees were old-time aficionados. They had institutional memories of the place, and encyclopedic recollections of their favorite singers' past performances. I experienced that fanatical devotion to singers that James McCourt has so compellingly depicted in his novels. Standing in line reminded me of the music students who jostle for a place in the cheap gallery (“the gods”) of the movie
The Red Shoes.
When I got back to Yale, I would compare notes with a fan of Anna Moffo—he had followed her on tour, but was now forced to sell his records to stay in graduate school.

A friend of mine is writing a book about his early attraction to music—all about the complex interplay of parts, the meeting of mathematics and sensuous pleasure, acoustical structure, and all that. My interest was from the outset more simple and visceral. I loved the many uses of the human voice. Even in high school, four recorded voices especially thrilled me—those of Judith Anderson, John Barrymore, Fyodor Chaliapin (as it was spelled then), and Jose Ferrer. I heard records of Judith Anderson performing Robinson Jeffers's
Medea
and her Lady Macbeth with Maurice Evans. As Medea, she baritoned the lines

As Lady Macbeth, she answered her husband's fear of failing:
“We? Fail
? But screw-your-courage-to-the-sticking-place, and WE'LL / NOT / FAIL!” Hers was the best woman actor's voice I knew till I heard Pamela Brown do
The Lady's Not for Burning
or Glenda Jackson as Chorus in
Murder in the Cathedral.

John Barrymore recorded only one soliloquy from
Hamlet
and one from
Richard III
during his brief Shakespearean time (1920-25) before the booze got to his voice and memory. He quickens his rhythm magically at “I'll
have
these players
play
-something-like-the murder-of-my-
father
before mine
uncle.
[Rising voice] I'll observe his
looks.
I'll
tent
him to the
quick
. If he do BLENCH, [Falling voice] I / KNOW / MY / COURSE.”

I heard Chaliapin sing the death of Boris Godunov in one of the old music stores of the 1940s that had listening booths. I could not afford to buy the record, but I went back several times to hear it over. I did not know what the words meant, but listening to the man's beautiful barking was like hearing a cave sing. That was the beginning of my love for opera. I heard Chaliapin on a 33⅓ rpm LP (long play as they were known then), but when I went to the Carnegie Library in my hometown (Adrian, Michigan), they still had 78 rpm shellac discs for loaning out. I toted them home. When I took out the multidisc recording of Mozart's
Magic Flute
(in two albums) it was too bulky for me to manage on my bicycle, so I had to walk all the way home with it weighing on my arms, and then go back for my bike.

When I visited a friend's home, we listened to old 78 rpm records of
Othello.
Most people remark the voice of Paul Robeson in the title role. I was more interested in Ferrer's performance as Iago, the way he could softly stab Othello with words: Did Cassio lie with Desdemona? “With her
, on her,
what you will.” Shortly after I had heard this tour de force of sly malice, I heard Ferrer twirl out sweet phrases under the balcony as Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1950 movie. I met Ferrer in 1957. The conservative newspaperman Willard Edwards introduced us. Conservatives admired him then because liberals detested him, after he made friendly noises to the anti-Communists in Hollywood. But I realized it was not his politics that prevented him from becoming a big movie star. Short men have a hard time getting to the top in that world. The only other short movie actor I met, Paul Newman—I talked with him during Eugene McCarthy's presidential race—succeeded because he was spectacularly good-looking, which Ferrer, for all his great voice, was not.