Everyone exists in the present. Everyone has presence. The role of the artist is to merge the two. For this, equanimity is needed. If this had been made clear to me at the outset, I wouldn’t have needed the disciplines I subjected myself to.
Have you ever noticed how tough it is to listen to most politicians making speeches? The few who can grab you are the exceptions that prove the rule.
I had the pleasure of meeting President Clinton recently and asked him how he did it. I met him at a gathering in London’s Guildhall, and he invited my girlfriend and me to his suite at the Ritz. We were lucky to find a black cab quickly and arrived first, so we had him to ourselves until his colleagues showed up. He has that innate intelligence that allows others the space to reveal where they’re at before he says much. I have always appreciated the artist in him. So I addressed him as such and asked him how he dealt with the changing dynamic of every new audience. He didn’t answer immediately, so I added that I never wrote speeches, preferring to get on stage, sense the qualities of the audience, and trust the inspiration would be there for me.
He explained that as he mostly wrote his speeches himself, including the one we had previously listened to, he was completely familiar with the material, but always arrived early to get the feel, the ambience of the audience so that he could improvise, albeit tethered to his material if he wasn’t inspired.
I found his explanation reassuring in the way it is when something agrees with your own view. Yet he convinced me he encompassed the energy of the audience by engaging them in the moment.
Cary Grant often changed his dialogue on the first take, to “freshen them up a bit.”
Marlon Brando was an opposite to my method of learning the lines well enough to forget them. On one of the days when we were both on set, I saw him fiddling around with a bit of paper, which he kept pulling out of his pocket, looking, mouthing a few words and returning it. He looked like a young actor just starting out rather than a giant of the screen.
“What are you up to, Brando?” I asked.
He pointed to a sizeable card hanging from the ceiling behind the camera; lit with its own light on which his dialogue was writ large.
“I can’t remember my lines anymore, so I have to read them. I thought if I could memorise my opening line,” he pulled his piece of paper from his pocket to show me, “I could say it on a turn toward the camera, make it look more natural.”
“How you gonna’ do Macbeth or Lear, if you can’t learn Superman’s dad?”
“I’ve learnt them already,” he retorted without a pause.
As I said before, he wasn’t a man to whom serious talk came easy. Yet he often quoted Shakespeare in a way that belied the flippant way he talked about the acting business.
When we spoke of the Bard and the current theories as to whether he or somebody else had written them, we agreed that as no royalties were being paid and everyone of the period was long gone, what was important were the plays themselves—the fact that somebody had picked up a quill, sharpened it, and wrote with the ink of the sky. Even inventing words to make his point.
When I was doing my bit for Fellini, he had my character Toby Dammit (adapted from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story) doing a boozy rendering of Macbeth’s speech, which climaxes with, “A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” At the time, I assumed it was part of Fellini’s own rather nihilistic take on the piece, set as it was in the hinterland after the demise of the body. Yet some months later, shooting a documentary to launch the film, we met again.
“How are you, Maestro?” I asked.
He grinned. “What has one nothing to say to another?” On reflection, I recalled a line from The Tempest.
“We are even stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
If Shakespeare is pointing to the dream-like passing of our existence, he is inferring a Dreamer, with whom it is registering. It gave me a different take on the Macbeth line: Our endless stream of thoughts are the dream, yet when awoken to, are tales told by an idiot.
It’s funny how things you experience that don’t really register at the time embody themselves in your psyche, returning unbidden years later.
When I had just left home and was sharing with two other actors a basement in Harley Street, I was befriended by the manager of a small cinema in Baker Street. They frequently aired really interesting older films. I caught Laurence Olivier’s Henry V there; and the manager, who often manned the box office himself, told me of a film version of Romeo and Juliet with Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, and John Barrymore. Seeing my obvious enthusiasm, he offered to get a print and screen it. Which turned out to be on a Saturday. I was as thrilled as I had been as a boy going to the Saturday morning picture shows at the Odeon Upton Park.
It has occurred to me that a lot of the names I mention that shaped my ideals will be unknown to you. If you have the time to check some of them out, you will bear witness to the timelessness of their artistry—as I did when I saw Leslie Howard’s Romeo and John Barrymore’s Mercutio. Both actors were at the top of their game, but I was particularly curious about Barrymore as there had been talk in the Irish side, my dad’s mother, that we were related to the Drews. And, like any young actor hoping to become a member of the business will grasp at any straw, I was happy to believe it. Barrymore’s rendering of the Queen Mab speech stayed with me for years, particularly that Queen Mab, the midwife of the fairies, comes in a shape no bigger than an agate stone. The dusting down of the line came again when I worked for Fellini and he told me he saw himself as a midwife when shooting a film. Could it be that Shakespeare’s invention of the royal Mab be part of my own structure? Did she visit me in those moments between “action and cut”? The Mab became my Queen.
Enter Orson.
In 1967, James Fraser, my long suffering agent, the first and only professional to witness my Iago, asked me if I would like to go to Paris to meet Orson Welles. Is a maraschino cherry red?
The following evening, I arrive at the designated restaurant. As I enter the cavernous space, all painted white, my eye is drawn to the only occupant. He is sitting against the far wall, dressed in black. It is, of course, Mr. Welles. I track in to get a close up, breathing deeply to fill the space between us.
We shake hands. He indicates the chair opposite him and I sit down.
“Are you travelling alone?” I ask.
The reply rumbles toward me from under the table and over it.
“It depends.”
I glance around at the table set for a lot more than two and ask, “Are a lot of people joining us?”
“It’s you and me for now. But I tend to accumulate,” he says with the famous grin. “You OK with red?”
A waiter has arrived with a bottle, extracts the cork and gives Orson a taste. After he pours us both a glass, he places the bottle beside me. Throughout the evening, while I was never aware of my host taking a drink, he regularly leaned over and nudged me to refill his glass, which had magically emptied itself.
He had a script from a Spanish classic called Divine Words, which he wanted me to read. He would get it to me. I had the impression he approved of my showing up alone. It was noticeable throughout the evening that whenever I revealed a new facet of myself, he seamlessly accommodated me and broadened his responses.
After highlighting a few of the specialties on the menu, all meat dishes, I was forced to confess I was a vegetarian. He didn’t pause, and with the same enthusiasm, reeled off a few without meat. Charm is a maligned word these days, yet Orson Welles bore witness to its original meaning. It was as natural to him as song is to birds.
As the evening progressed and I became more comfortable in his presence, I asked him why he had such a hard time putting films together considering the depth of his genius and the dross that was increasingly being produced.
“The trouble began with Kane,” he answered, “Or rather its inspiration, William Randolph Hearst—the big man with the thin but far reaching voice.”
I knew what he meant. It was said that the publishing magnate’s influence was so great that by use of media which he’d controlled, he had pushed the United States into war with Spain at the turn of the century. Destroying the career of a film director would have been no problem for Hearst.
According to a story I’d recently heard, Ronan O’Rahilly, the founder of Radio Caroline, had commissioned a script for Orson, with the money in place to make the film. The night before the cheque was to be signed O’Rahilly was at a dinner party with the backer. Some friends of the publishing magnate were also at the table and conversation turned to the upcoming movie and its director. Things were said and warnings issued. By morning the backer and his backing had vanished. I knew about this because one of the parts had been written with me in mind.
“Is that why you’re planning to shoot this one in Spain?” I asked.
“It is where the money is. I can shoot anywhere.” Again the famous smile. And then, “I’m a high wire act. I guess you are, too.”
“I’d tell you if I knew what you meant.”
“No safety net. Oven fresh, when you perform.”
“When I’m out there. I aspire to it. Haven’t cracked it on the stage though.”
“You’ll get there.”
Encouraged by the turn of the conversation, I asked, “Any tips?”
After tapping my arm and indicating his empty glass, he considered. “The moment before you go on… assure yourself you’re going to get to the end. That’s what opera singers do. The more you trust in the muse, the more she’ll be there for you.”
“Can you tell me how you feel the muse?”
He smiled. “No.” Another smile. “If we do the movie, we’ll have lots to talk about.”
I held his glance. Would I ever get another chance? “I bet you can describe her… Queen Mab.”
He looked at me anew. Truly engaging me. There was a pause until, finally, he said. “It’s one manifesting through the many.”
His answer was in keeping with Shakespeare’s intention of Queen Mab, the fairy mid-wife from Romeo and Juliet, helping sleepers give birth to their dreams.
But then, why wouldn’t his answer be spot-on? Orson knew all about dreams, about their inspiration and struggle towards fulfilment.
I wanted more, but by then the room had begun to fill up and, hearing his famous voice, other diners came over to shake his hand. Some accepting his openness, sat down; an impromptu audience, at which I was a courtier. Orson had energy and time for everyone.
After Orson died, Jeanne Moreau said of Orson Welles, “He was a king without a country.” To me, he was royalty whose domain was his own aura. The wonderful treatment of Divine Words didn’t happen. He failed to raise the bread.