RAINS’S RELATIVE ISOLATION IN PENNSYLVANIA did nothing to lessen the ceaseless stream of fan mail, from which the actor could have easily inferred that the years had enlarged rather than diminished his professional stature and that women of all ages still thrilled to his polished, rich, and sensual voice and to the memory of all those screen portrayals of urbane wickedness and gallantry.
There seemed no reason that he should have been especially attracted to a pale pink envelope that appeared in the profusion of his mail one morning. But something attracted him to it, and he opened this envelope first. The writer identified herself as a West Chester housewife named Rosemary McGroarty, and she inquired, with great deference, if Rains would be willing to address a local theatrical group called The Footlighters.
Although Rains received many such requests (and frequently granted them), he telephoned Mrs. McGroarty immediately, intending to tell her he was leaving the following day for some engagement. Her voice, he recalled, was both melodious and vivacious, and he suddenly found himself inviting her to visit. It was an invitation he regretted the moment he gave it, for he realized he had merely succumbed to the pleasure of her voice. “Now, why did I do that?” he muttered to himself.
His housekeeper would not arrive until nearly noon, so he put the coffee on the stove himself and waited irritably for his visitor. It was eleven o'clock before the doorbell rang. Rains braced himself, in the manner of a star confronting a stage door congestion of fans, and resolved to say that, as much as he would like to accommodate The Footlighters, it was not possible.
He was stunned as he pulled open the door, for instead of the frumpy village matron he had expected, there stood a willowy blonde woman in a bright yellow coat and an immense paisley-banded picture hat—“this glorious creature,” he later recalled. A decorous hour ensued, wherein Mrs. McGroarty sat demurely at the old pine table by the kitchen fireplace, discussing aspects of the theatre and Rains's career. She was familiar enough with his work to accurately quote one of his more memorable lines from Deception.
Rains was both flattered and impressed, and he resolved to himself to telephone her as soon as he returned from Hollywood and the filming of This Earth Is Mine, a bucolic melodrama set in California's wine country, in which he played a bearded, irascible patriarch to Jean Simmons, Dorothy McGuire, and Rock Hudson.
Rains's daughter and her friends at Bennington were especially curious about the male lead in This Earth Is Mine. Several of them crowded into a phone booth when she called her father long distance. “Is it true that Rock Hudson is homosexual?” they wanted to know.
“Of course not,” said Rains, deadpan. “He's perfectly charming. He always says ‘Good morning, Claudie,’ and gives me a friendly pat on the behind.”
This Earth Is Mine was Rains's first film for Universal since Phantom of the Opera, and “the first one that has a pleasant title. I was starting to believe they would only engage me for horror pictures,” he told studio publicist Bob Rains, whom industry people often assumed was some relation to Claude, perhaps his son. Rock Hudson had introduced the non-namesakes to each other. Bob asked Claude if he knew anything about London's Rains University, which had been obliterated in the Blitz. Bob's great-grandfather had taught journalism there. Claude wasn't familiar with the school, but he took a liking to Bob and, on two subsequent trips to London, sent the publicist gag photos, the first with an attached note: “I still can't locate the Rains University. I trust this will suffice until I do.” The photo showed Rains standing in front of the Tower of London holding a hand-lettered sign reading RAINS UNIVERSITY. A few years later came a follow-up: “They say if you don't succeed, try, try again. And I have tried and tried and tried. I really think I am getting too old to look for the Rains University. But I guess that fathers should never stop trying to help their sons.” The photo this time showed Rains outside Buckingham Palace, with a new sign: SORRY, THIS ISN'T IT!
After Rains returned to Pennsylvania from Hollywood, he never managed to telephone Mrs. McGroarty, possibly because soon after his return, through what he only described as “some West Chester social accident,” he made the acquaintance of Agi Jambor, a distinguished pianist-composer who taught music at Bryn Mawr College. Jambor was fifty-one, a Hungarian Jew who had fled the Holocaust (one of her best-known compositions was the piano solo “Sonata for the Victims of Auschwitz”); her specialty was Bach. Rains and Jambor shared several dinners with friends and also shared their memories of the war. According to Rains, Jambor was soon begging him to marry her. Impulsively, he agreed, and they wed on November 4, 1959, six days short of his seventieth birthday.
His friends were puzzled by the match. Rains told them, “She's a wonderful artist. I can listen to the music.” Agi said that her husband had a good musical ear; he often offered her suggestions, which were always correct. He was delighted by her accent, which reminded him of the Gabor sisters. But an undercurrent of depression also seems to have fueled the decision to marry. Both were lonely—Agi had lost her first husband ten years before—and Rains was melancholy. “It's getting on towards the end,” he said. “I'm through.” He felt a final marriage to an artist might “be calm and peaceful.”
It wasn't. Problems started on their wedding day. On their way to the ceremony, Agi insisted on delaying the nuptials and returning home because she had forgotten to wear the underwear in which she had previously been married, and which had sentimental value. “She was imperious with me,” Rains said. “Her habits were not nice. I'll put it that way. They were dreadful.” Having a pianist in the house, for instance, was hardly the soothing experience he expected. “She drove me crazy,” he said, as she practiced on a silent keyboard; he couldn't stand watching her hands flying around with no music to appreciate. But Rains's own habits weren't nice, either. He had an explosive temper and was given to throwing things. Also, according to Agi, he was “an incredibly heavy drinker.” “My heart would bleed for him,” she said, “because he was so insecure. He never enjoyed his success.”
Rains was stingy with money, even to the point of claiming he was broke (which was hardly the case, although most of his assets were tied up in investments and annuities). When Agi would ask for more grocery money (she claimed, improbably, that he gave her a grand total of $9.40 for food shopping during their entire marriage), he told her she should earn additional money of her own. This was sheer spite: Agi already had a modest income from lecturing at Bryn Mawr and making occasional concert appearances; she soon understood that Rains would never really tolerate a wife with a career of her own. Paradoxically, though, he never discouraged her from working, on the basis that “One does not waste a talent.”
Rains soon grew to dislike his wife's spicy Hungarian cooking as much as she balked at his predilection for bland English cuisine (which may explain the constant arguments about groceries). Rains also claimed that she brought pornographic books into their bedroom in an attempt to excite her seventy-year-old husband, who was past his sexual prime. This only repulsed him. “She was sexually starved,” he said. According to his daughter, “He was extremely moralistic, and pornography appalled him. Once, when I was visiting in New Hampshire, I was reading the [at that time, expurgated] diaries of Anaïs Nin, at his recommendation. He was reading ahead of me and became so scandalized that he confiscated the book and told me I was never to finish it.” One of the few posthumous compliments Agi would pay him was to call him “a very moral man.”
Eventually, while Rains was in California on a television assignment, he impulsively called his handyman and told him to change the locks on all the doors while Agi was out shopping. “I was sewing costumes for an off-Broadway show,” recalled his daughter, “and suddenly got a call from Agi, saying that she came back from the market, couldn't get into the house, and didn't know what was happening. But I immediately knew what was happening and told her to call my father's lawyer.”
Rains also called his lawyer from Hollywood with a frantic plea to “Get me out of this.” He was determined. “I don't care what it costs,” he said, “and I don't care what she says about me.” The latter was not precisely true. He had been married so many times that the notoriety of another divorce would distress him greatly. Yet he bore it all with outward equanimity, even in the relative privacy of the company of his friends. Jambor, locked out of the house and forced to relocate, filed for divorce in May 1960. Her petition charged that, in “violation of his marriage vows and of the laws of this Commonwealth, the defendant has over a period of time commencing on or about November 5, 1959 offered such indignities to the person of the plaintiff as to render her condition intolerable and life burdensome.” In his response, Rains denied the charges and demanded proof. Evidently, sufficient proof was provided; Jambor was granted her divorce on July 28, 1960. The terms of the financial settlement were never made public. Rains only said, “I let her make her charges and paid her off.”
Rains had been shuttling back and forth between Pennsylvania and California several times in the six months between his meeting Rosemary McGroarty and marrying and divorcing Agi Jambor. He had nearly forgotten about Rosemary when he happened to see her one day in the spring of 1960. He was in his driveway, discussing the problems of his Mercedes 300 SL with a West Chester mechanic who had come to take it away, when he noticed a movement of feminine raiment. He turned in time to see Rosemary walking briskly by the house. He did not recognize her immediately, and by the time it dawned on him who it was, she was already gone.
He dismissed the mechanic and went into the house, wondering what he had done with her initial letter, fretfully trying to remember her name. He was rummaging through the drawers and slots of his Chippendale desk, marveling at his sudden longing to see the lady again, when the telephone rang. It was she. The sound of her voice made him feel like a timorous teenaged swain.
“I hope I'm not disturbing you,” she began, with appealing diffidence. “I wasn't aware that you spend much time here. But I did see you earlier today, and as long as you are here now I would like to talk to you again about The Footlighters.” There was more, but the conversation never progressed beyond this impersonal level. Rains invited her to breakfast the very next day, somewhat alarmed at his eagerness to see her.
He awoke at dawn as usual and fidgeted impatiently for the three hours before her arrival, assembling a menu of bacon, scrambled eggs, and grilled tomatoes, setting the old pine table with antique sterling and blue willow ware, and finally building a fire in the kitchen fireplace.
When Rosemary arrived, she was even more lovely than Rains had remembered, and the breakfast that followed was a tense, mutually self-conscious, exploratory conversation during which, he noted, her hand trembled whenever she raised her coffee cup.
It was only after she had gone that he could consider with any detachment the emotional tempest her presence had occasioned. She was a divorcée in her early forties—nearly thirty years his junior—and she had three children: a daughter who was a freshman at Bryn Mawr; one son, nearly grown; and another barely ten. She had only recently moved to West Chester from Wilkes Barre, where she had spent most of her life, apart from an extensive art education at Moore's Academy, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Barnes Foundation, all in Philadelphia. During a subsequent series of tête-à-têtes in the Rains kitchen that spring, Rosemary indicated that she might like to be his biographer, even though she was not a professional writer and had no significant contacts in the publishing world. Nonetheless, he relished the attention.
They only met in private. Divorce litigation with Agi was still pending, and Rains dared not be seen with another woman in public. He tried to explain this to Rosie one morning, but it came out like this: “I wish I would have known you six months ago. I did a very foolish thing which I might not have done. I married a lady I shouldn't have married.”
This implied proposal of marriage elicited some candor from Rosemary as well. She admitted that she had written him only because she wanted to meet him. Her association with the amateur theatrical group was tenuous at best. It had, in fact, all been a ruse. She later disclosed to Rains that her sole reason for moving to West Chester was just to be near him. She had already told friends in Wilkes Barre that her goal was to marry him. Rosemary was not the first, and would certainly not be the last, obsessive fan to romantically stalk a Hollywood star in his declining years.
Rains by this time was old, alone, and drinking more heavily than ever. He never questioned Rosie's intentions. He was starved for company and companionship. Around this time he returned to Hollywood to play Professor Challenger in Irwin Allen's remake of The Lost World for Twentieth Century–Fox, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. (The film, originally touted as a state-of-the-art spectacular with stop-motion special effects that would put the original, silent Lost World to shame, in the end was just a tacky spectacle with optically inflated lizards running rampant on miniature sets.) The cast included Jill St. John, Michael Rennie, David Hedison, and Richard Haydn, who later became a close friend. Rains spent several evenings at Haydn's pleasant home in Santa Monica Canyon, where he talked incessantly about Rosemary.
Shortly after Rains arrived in Hollywood, the Screen Actors Guild called a strike, which halted production of The Lost World, so the actor returned to West Chester. Marriage was now a tacit understanding between Rains and Rosemary, although he still had doubts that he could make a success of it. Was he wildly romanticizing and idealizing her, as he had done with his five other wives? The couple began taking weekend trips to Bucks County and beyond, booking double accommodations to avoid scrutiny. Once, at the Swiftwater Inn in the Poconos, they were treated with such lavish hospitality that they decided to be married there when the Jambor divorce was final.
Rains soon went west again to finish The Lost World. Rosemary wrote him letters of stirring encouragement and astonishing ardor. Each night, when he returned from the studio to his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he would telephone her to exchange love talk and the trivia of the day.
One night when he returned to the hotel after work, he found outside his door a single, fresh lily. Inside the door was a handsome, dark-haired, middle-aged woman he had previously seen staring at him in the hotel dining room. He left the suite door open and silently gestured for her to leave. Resolute hostility, he had learned, was the best way to repel amorous fans.
“I only want to talk to you,” she pleaded.
“Please get out,” Rains replied stiffly.
Then the telephone rang. It was Rosemary. Rains put his hand over the receiver and glared at the woman, who had now moved brazenly to the center of the room, staring back at him.
“I'll scream,” the woman threatened.
“I don't care what you do,” Rains answered. “Just get out. If you don't leave immediately, I shall call the manager.”
“You're very rude,” the woman said haughtily. She left without screaming, but slammed the door behind her.
“What was that?” Rosemary asked.
Rains told her, dismissing the incident as a common hazard for celebrities. But Rosemary smelled sexual competition, and her voice rose several decibels. “When it comes to you,” she said, “I can be savage.”
After the phone call, the spurned intruder returned, with ferocity of her own, and began banging on Rains's door, furiously demanding an audience. Rains called hotel security and had the screaming woman removed.
He returned to Pennsylvania. The Lost World had hardly been worth his effort and time, and it did nothing for his professional reputation. The film generated sarcastic and dismissive reviews, as per Time’s critique: “‘The Lost World’ exhibits Claude Rains in a red fright wig, and Jill St. John in—just barely—a pair of pink slacks. These wonders notwithstanding, the most intriguing performers, as is only proper in a Good-Lord-Professor-Can-It-Be? film, are several dinosaurs.” The New York Times, which almost always championed his work, called his performance “a caricature.”
Claude Rains married Rosemary McGroarty in August 1960. His daughter said later, “He told me that there were some problems in the marriage.” According to her, Rosemary “had expected to be the wife of a movie star, and of course he wasn't living that kind of life.” Rains was busy with television in Hollywood, and Rosemary accompanied him to Los Angeles while he worked on episodes of Naked City, Rawhide, and a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of Lost Horizon called Shangri-La. She disliked southern California as much as he did, complaining especially about the stale-tasting water. The television assignments, perfunctorily produced, were nothing like the prestige productions he had done under the now-defunct studio system.
Rosemary pressured Rains to accept what turned out to be a terrible assignment in an Italian science fiction movie, Battle of the Worlds. The movie would be remembered largely for the camp spectacle of Rains wearing a helmet without a faceplate, despite being in deep space. But at least it would include a semi-glamorous vacation. Jennifer and her husband, Eddie, were traveling in Europe that summer and met Rains and Rosemary in Rome. The studio sent a limousine for the four of them. Rains sat in front with the driver, and Jennifer, Eddie, and Rosemary were seated in the back. As they passed the Appian Way, Rosemary could not contain herself. “Do you know who this is?” she asked the driver excitedly, pointing at Rains. “Julius Cesare! Julius Cesare!” The driver, who barely spoke English, had no idea what she was saying, even with her attempt at an Italian accent. “We were all mortified,” recalled Jennifer. Rains's daughter had remained on friendly terms with Agi Jambor and was not at all impressed with her father's sixth wife.
Ariane Ulmer, the daughter of film director Edgar G. Ulmer, was working at a post-production facility in Rome at the same time Rains was doing voice synchronization for Battle of the Worlds. She was then engaged to an Italian whose family strongly disapproved of their son's choice. When Ulmer entertained Rains and his wife at her Rome apartment, she found Rosemary to be “extremely cool,” but Rains, ever the romantic, encouraged her to proceed with the marriage despite the family friction. Ulmer was touched by his concern and advice, which she followed. “It was like having Mr. Skeffington suddenly walk into my life,” she recalled. “He was a total sweetheart, the romantic of all romantics.”
After returning to the States, Rains appeared onstage with the Philadelphia Orchestra, reading Tennyson's narrative poem Enoch Arden to Richard Strauss's score. The concert was well received, and Schuyler Chapin, head of RCA Records, invited Rains to record his performance in collaboration with famed Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Rains was flattered. He greatly admired Gould's work, but the recording session proved an ordeal. Gould was an idiosyncratic talent who had withdrawn from the concert stage to the protection of the recording studio, where he could exert complete technical control over his performances.
Rosemary attended the recording session in New York, and a collision of one obsessive personality against another was inevitable. “Mrs. Rains was quick to imagine slights to her husband,” Chapin wrote in his memoir Musical Chairs. Soon the performers were working separately in the same studio, concealed from each other behind screens. According to Chapin,
They set to work with mutual suspicion. Gould would romp through florid piano parts while Rains rolled out the language with suppressed chokes and sobs that were so much a part of nineteenth-century declamation. Mrs. Rains was constantly furious and the conversations between the artists were peppered with her comments.…But they did finish it and at the end stiffly acknowledged that they had both done some service to Tennyson and Strauss.
Rains's only comment on the episode was that Gould was “the most temperamental performer I have ever known.”
In 1961, Rains and Rosemary traveled to Spain for his small but nonetheless memorable role of a British diplomat in David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia, which was released the following year. Stanley Kauffmann, reviewing the film for The New Republic, observed, “Playing a diplomat, Claude Rains, always a fine and now vintage actor, is simply not on the screen long enough to suit us.” However minimal his participation, Rains, for the last time, enhanced the prestige of a film that would go on to receive great acclaim, winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Following his work on Lawrence of Arabia, Rains had dinner with his daughter's Brentwood playmate Susan Strasberg, who was then an actress and avatar of her father's method. Jennifer had also studied with Susan's father Lee Strasberg, and was convinced that her own father was essentially a method actor himself, whether he acknowledged it or not.
Susan Strasberg, who barely remembered Rains as a neighbor in the Brentwood days, said of his screen work, “Oh, Mr. Rains, I've been at your feet for years.”
“I've been at yours recently,” he replied. “I'm very much like you. I think a lot about what I'm doing. People might say I'm a method actor. If I don't have a reason for doing or saying something, I don't do or say it. I think a lot about what I'm doing. I like to think I've marched with the times.”
“Many actors were left behind when acting changed,” Rains said later. “I recognized the change about the time I did Clemence Dane's Will Shakespeare in 1921. Many actors speak off the cuff. They're not concerned too much about the thoughts of the characters. They're concerned about getting the line over. I work hard and I get the man into my guts.”
Despite his compliment to Susan Strasberg and his obvious, if self-taught, affinities with Stanislavski, Rains could be critical of so-called method actors: “These method bastards think, but it's become so mannered it's no longer what they intended it to be.”
In 1963, shortly after receiving his Academy Award for Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean called Rains in West Chester and asked for a personal favor. Before returning to England, the director was ghost-directing a prologue to George Stevens's biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told and needed a seasoned character actor for a few days’ work.
“I want you to play that old bastard who killed all those kikes,” Lean said.
“Do you mean—Herod?” Rains ventured.
“Yes, that's his name,” Lean replied. Rains knew that Lean was not anti-Semitic but could be profoundly tone-deaf on social, cultural, and historical issues. According to his biographer Kevin Brownlow, Lean “was on another planet politically. He barely noticed World War II.” Given this, it is not surprising that Lean never comprehended the postwar controversy that arose over Alec Guinness's hook-nosed Fagin in Lean's adaptation of Dickens's Oliver Twist; the uproar led to the film's being banned in Israel, with calls raised for its suppression in America and elsewhere.
Rains accepted the assignment and immediately flew to Los Angeles. Lean's prologue to Greatest Story is now generally regarded as the artistic highlight in a generally overblown film. The historical record of the old king Herod contains no mention of the slaughter of Jewish children, but Rains effectively played his part of the biblical account in a semiimprovised sequence. Lean felt that some kind of unscripted flourish to Herod's death scene was needed and suggested that Rains throw forward Herod's staff at the moment of his demise. Rains didn't understand the motivation, but trusted Lean's direction and complied, to good effect.
Rains's final film role (though not the last to be released—Greatest Story would have many post-production delays) was in Twilight of Honor for MGM. Rains played Richard Chamberlain's crusty legal mentor, an alcoholic who perversely indulges his addiction by getting other people drunk, after which, he says, “I stagger up to bed and sleep it off.”
Rains and Rosemary left Pennsylvania in the summer of 1963 for a new home in Sandwich, New Hampshire. According to his daughter, “He bought something that needed to be restored or fixed up. That's what he loved to do.”
Around this time Jennifer embarked on an acting career in New York, only to learn that a “Jennifer Rains” was already registered with Actors’ Equity. She chose a new name: Jessica.
Rains's next acting assignment reunited him with his costar in Twilight of Honor, Richard Chamberlain. In January 1964 Rains was again back in Hollywood, shooting an episode of Dr. Kildare. He and Rosemary usually wrote each other several times a week when he traveled, but during his last week at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he didn't receive any letters. When Rains returned home he found his wife uncharacteristically withdrawn. A few days later she discovered a lump in her chest. Tests conducted in New Hampshire were negative, but the lump was real. They consulted a doctor in New York, who performed exploratory surgery at Roosevelt Hospital. “The news isn't good, Claude,” the doctor told him. The cancer had metastasized to a point where the doctor couldn't determine where it had begun. Eventually Rosemary was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Neither Rains nor her doctor told Rosemary that she had cancer. She took an apartment on East Ninth Street in order to begin a series of injection treatments with her New York physician, but she soon found she was unable to climb the building's stairs. Rains arranged for her to stay at the Algonquin Hotel in a suite with twin beds. “I didn't think there was going to be any more loving,” he said. In March, Rosemary returned to New Hampshire, but she continued to lose strength. At one point, when Rains used a euphemism in discussing her illness, Rosemary told him, “Please don't do that to me any longer. I know what I've got.”
In August Rains bought a lake cottage a few miles from the house so that Rosemary could see and be near water. But the weather proved inclement, and in September they returned to the main house. Over the next several months Rosemary's condition steadily declined. She could only navigate stairs by crawling on all fours. Her daughter was a steady presence, giving her mother Demerol injections for the pain. Through it all, Rosemary remained stoic, even humorous. Once, when Father Paris, Rosemary's priest, visited, he commented on her intravenous feeding tube. “You're eating very slowly,” he said. “Luck of the Irish,” she replied.
Rosemary died on the morning of New Year's Eve, 1964. Rains designed her headstone himself, a traditional upright marker in black granite. For her epitaph, he combined the opening lines of Christina Georgina Rossetti's poem “Song” with a slightly altered refrain from the funeral hymn “Now the Laborer's Task Is O'er” (1871) by John Lodge Ellerton:
ROSEMARY McGROARTY RAINS
1917–1964
The Beloved Wife of
Claude Rains
“When I am dead my dearest
Sing no sad songs for me.
Rather, in thy gracious keeping
Leave me now
Thy servant sleeping.”
At the funeral at nearby Red Hill Cemetery, the officiating priest said, “As a result of her divorce and remarriage, Rosemary was not a Catholic in good standing. But when she discovered she had cancer, she made her peace with her God and with her Church, and was thus enabled to enjoy once again the consolations of her faith during the last months of her life.” During his wife's illness, Rains had considered converting to Catholicism, but ultimately was not up to the task. As he said later, “Before marriage, we had no religious discussion. I told her I was not a religious person.” He was, however, instrumental in having the church reinstate her. After her death, he sent the local Catholic church a check for an unknown amount.
After Rosemary's death, Rains recalled, “I thought I couldn't sleep in the old gothic bed, but I said to myself, you damn fool, you have to.” The housekeeper insisted on making up the bed with four pillows as before. Rains pinned a copy of the last letter Rosemary ever sent him to her pillow. It had been written in October 1964 and concluded with a quotation from Shakespeare's Richard II: “But heaven hath hand in these events, God, to whose high will be bound our calm content.”
Rains was not inclined to save fan mail, but he did preserve one letter from a woman in Revere, Massachusetts, because of its mention of Rosemary:
Dear Mr. Rains,
Last August, when we were on vacation in Saunders Bay, N.H., we were shopping in Laconia. As we were riding, I yelled out to my family in the car, “There's Claude Rains coming out of the hotel dining room!” Well, they thought I was crazy but we turned around and attempted to follow you, which wasn't very nice, but as we are terrific fans of yours, maybe we will be excused.…You had parked at a market and we asked the lady who was with you as you passed our car if it was Claude Rains, and she said yes, and it was also her husband. What a wonderful gracious person she was and we were all so sorry to hear that she had died. I will always remember that day. [She] told us how sick she had been from her operation, and she said, I'm not pregnant, pointing to her stomach.…We got out our pens and paper and as you came out of the market, your lovely wife said, honey, these people are waiting to see you and talk to you. She was so very down to earth because she could have well given us the brush off. You were such a perfect gentleman. You talked to us and signed our papers, and you will remember chiding my daughter because all she had was an envelope stamped and you didn't want to use that but she said she didn't care and you wrote on it, “waste not, want not.” Then you told us of your coming television play and I guess we were about the happiest family in the city that day. We all agreed you were just like on the screen, so natural and so mannerly. Your wife had gone on to the car after saying goodbye to us and my daughter was interested in your car and she went to look at it and again your wife took the time and trouble to tell her all about it, which was so interesting. We were brought up in the old fashioned way of manners, kindness and consideration and to meet show people who returned the same was such a thrill for us.…Our sympathy to you in the loss of that lovely gracious lady who took the time to be nice to a very appreciative family. We have long been fans of yours and will continue to be.
Not long after Rosemary's death, Jessica's marriage to Edward Brash failed. Although she and her father were never comfortable talking about emotional issues, she thought he might be able to provide some insight or support, given his own five divorces. Rains was ill and in bed when she told him the news. He sat bolt upright, and boomed in his world-famous voice: “Tell me—was it sex?”
During Rosemary's illness, in the summer of 1964, Jonathan Root, a well-regarded reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, happened to be in the projection room of a Hollywood film laboratory with his friend Dick Berg, producer of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater for NBC. The two men were waiting to see the finished print of “Something About Lee Wiley,” a dramatization of the mid-career blindness of the Jazz Age singing sensation. The principal roles were performed by Claude Rains, Piper Laurie (as Wiley), and Steven Hill. As they got ready to watch the start of the drama, Berg nudged his friend.
“Now,” he whispered excitedly, “watch a real pro.”
As Root recalled, “The screen brightened and Rains appeared abruptly in its luminescent center, in an instantly rich and virile portrayal of a self-made midwestern millionaire, seething with the omnipotence of raw wealth. The performance so impressed me that I reflected on it and came to conclude that Claude Rains was as much a cinematic institution as the medium itself”—not to mention an excellent subject for an authorized biography. Root had already published a well-received chronicle of explorer-author Richard Halliburton and was looking for a new project.
Dick Berg had been instrumental in convincing Rains to do television at a time when many Hollywood stars were shunning the medium. He broke Rains's resistance by driving to his farm with a script for him to read, then refusing to leave until he read it. When Berg learned of Rosemary's death, he immediately called Rains and asked if he could come to LA at once to do another Bob Hope Chrysler Theater. He knew that for Rains, work was the only antidote to the grief he was suffering. The script was a farcical comedy called “Cops and Robbers.” Rains would costar with Bert Lahr and Eduardo Cianelli, affect a broad Italian accent, and generally have a good time.
“I asked Father Paris and he said, go,” Rains remembered. As usual, he showed up at NBC punctually and was thoroughly prepared, his lines memorized. But Hollywood no longer held any charm for Rains, if it ever did. “I was never happy in Hollywood,” he said. “The way people lived. I didn't like the country. Bare and cold to look at.” On his last night in Los Angeles, he had dinner with Berg. Rains recalled, “I got drunk and he drove me to the airport. I restrained myself, didn't let him know what was going on inside me. I don't even remember getting on the plane.”
Concerned about Rains, Berg encouraged Root to pursue a biography with the actor. Soon after, while in New York on other business, Root telephoned Rains in New Hampshire. As Root later wrote, “He was flying down to New York the next day, he told me in that haunting voice, for a press conference with the Theatre Guild about a play in which he would be starring in the fall of 1965, and he would be pleased to meet me at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, where he was staying.” The next day, Root recalled, “He met me at the door to his suite with urbane graciousness, arched an eyebrow eloquently and beckoned me inside.” A waiter was already serving chicken sandwiches and coffee at a small table. “It's nearly tea time,” Rains said, “and I thought you might be hungry.”
Root immediately noticed the way Rains's regal bearing suggested a much taller man. He remembered him wearing “an impeccably tailored light grey suit, a white shirt with a soft collar, and a somewhat large and colorful tie.”
“They're tearing down this old hotel,” Rains said. “Going to put up an office building or something. I expect this is the last time I'll stay here.”
Rains walked to the window and stared silently for a moment, surveying the rooftops and squinting at the grey hulk of the Queensborough Bridge in the distance.
“Yes, the last time,” he said, turning away. “And that makes me sad.”
Then he smiled abruptly, rubbed his hands together, and gestured for Root to sit at the table. “The time passed with irritating haste,” Root wrote, but he was at least able to outline his ideas for a biographical project, to which Rains seemed receptive. But finally he looked at his watch and announced, apologetically, that he must leave or be late for his appointment at the Theatre Guild. “Do you know Joel Schenker?” Rains asked.
“No,” Root replied.
“He's producing this play for the Guild. It's by the Italian, Ugo Betti, adapted by Henry Denker. It's a marvelous play. It has some wonderful things to say about our times. About all times, for that matter. Joel waited a year for me, until I was available. Isn't that remarkable?”
Probably more sensible than remarkable, Root replied.
“Oh, no,” Rains protested. “There are many actors who could have done it beautifully.”
Root remembered Rains pulling a double-breasted black chesterfield coat from the closet. The garment dated from his early years in London. “He slipped into it not unlike a monarch donning his robes, plucked a black Homburg from the closet shelf and ushered me out the door.” As they stepped into the elevator, the operator, “a pleasant, slender, fortyish woman,” broke into a rapturous smile. “Oh, Mr. Rains,” she said. “How very nice to see you again.”
Rains responded with a beatific grin. “Thank you, my dear,” he said. “But I'm very sad because you're tearing down my hotel.” At that point, recalled Root, “Any further discussion of the hotel's demolition was halted by a stop midway in the descent,” when “half a dozen men wearing convention badges oozed into the car, and began to stare at Rains in unison.”
At the curb of Fifty-Eighth Street, a beaming doorman flagged a cab and swept open its door with a flourish. A bitter winter wind grabbing at his homburg, Rains shook Root's hand and agreed to continue their conversations about the biography. They corresponded over the next six months and agreed to proceed with a formal book proposal. In July 1965, Root returned to New York and boarded a nine-passenger Statewide Airways plane for New Hampshire.
“We landed at dusk and Rains was standing at the edge of the tarmac,” Root wrote. “There's Claude Rains,” announced the pilot. “He's quite a guy. Flies with us all the time.”
Rains, now seventy-four, insisted on carrying half of Root's luggage to his Jeep station wagon and drove him thirty miles to Sandwich. “We drank some Scotch, ate some cold chicken, and talked for a long time,” Root reported. “We talked for several weeks at intervals during the following year,” he wrote, “much of the conversation in the book-lined study overlooking his rose garden, or in the huge, maple-paneled kitchen, under the omnipresent solicitude of Lillian White, his non-taciturn Yankee housekeeper.” Among the treasures he shared with Root were a pair of theatrical scrapbooks maintained by a devoted English fan who gave them to Rains during World War II for protection from possible destruction during the Blitz. Over the next year, Root audiotaped most of his and Rains's discussions, finally clocking more than two dozen hours. The tapes were augmented by extensive written notes, taken in person as well as by telephone and correspondence.
Rains and Root decided that their book, provisionally titled The Love Habit after the romantic comedy by Louis Verneuil in which Rains had performed in the 1920s, would be anchored around an idyllic account of Rains's marriage to Rosemary. “I've loved many women, but only one loved me back,” Rains said, in a line that could have been concocted by a dust-jacket copywriter. Root was historically scrupulous in most of his interviews and research, as was Rains in his career recollections, but Rains had a blind spot when it came to Rosemary, and Root's notes contain a certain number of quotations unsupported by audiotape that, frankly, seem trumped up for book proposal purposes. “You're a very attractive woman,” Rains supposedly tells Rosemary, who has just confessed to relentlessly stalking him. Nonetheless, “Suddenly, I found myself in her arms…”
Rains's highly anticipated return to the stage received much publicity and prompted Bette Davis to send him a handwritten note:
Claude dear,
You can't know how greatly I admire you—your performance—your courage—and just you! I wish you so much success with the play—watching you give a performance is always a privilege to me—I am so lucky I have worked with you so many times. It made me homesick for those days.
Always my love—and I look forward to New Hampshire one day.
Bette
But Rains's health was failing, and the run of Ugo Betti's So Much of Earth, So Much of Heaven at the Westport Country Playhouse was short-lived. Rains played a dictator in self-exile called upon to lead his people again during the threat of a world holocaust. He acted from a wheelchair (as per the script), and actress Joanna Miles, playing his nurse, was onstage with him at all times. It soon became clear he was forgetting his lines. The company revered Rains, and watching a great actor falter was “terrifying,” she recalled. During rehearsals, he had been in good spirits, even accompanying the cast to a local club, where he seemed to enjoy the performance of an unusually artistic drag performer. It would be the last bit of theatre Claude Rains ever witnessed.
The reviews of the play were not good. Variety opined that “it is torpid theatre, and impresses neither in content nor form.…As a vehicle for Claude Rains, absent from the Broadway scene for almost ten years, the offering also misses.” After the fourth performance, Rains was replaced by an understudy, and the Theatre Guild dropped its plans for a New York transfer. On September 10, 1965, Rains's attorney, Nochem S. Winnet, wrote to Root: “I regret to tell you that the play Claude Rains was in was too much for him. I saw him Monday night at the opening and it was no surprise to me to get a message from him today that he is in the Coatsville Hospital at Coatsville, Pennsylvania. It looks as though he will be there for about ten days and then he plans to go back to New Hampshire. Claude wanted me to get the message to you.”
“People sent flowers from all over the world,” Miles remembered, so much so that they lined the corridor and spilled into other patients’ rooms. Rains minimized his condition to the medical staff and visitors, explaining, for instance, that his vomiting “blood” was simply the result of eating too many beets.
The press was told that Rains was withdrawing due to a bleeding peptic ulcer. In reality, advanced cirrhosis was creating a backup of blood in his liver, resulting in internal hemorrhaging. Surgeons created a portacaval shunt, diverting blood flow from his diseased liver to other blood vessels. Jessica was told that the operation might be able to prolong her father's life, but whenever the bypass failed, he would die.
There is no record that Rains discussed his medical condition with Root, who continued to interview him regularly until at least October 1966. The actor claimed to have finally gotten over the grief of Rosemary's death, retaining only the warm memories. But a certain darkness was descending. “I can't stand the winter nights here alone,” he told Root, and said he was considering yet another relocation. “You know how alive water is? I think of something near water. Lillian will come to me a certain distance. I think also about Rye and Portsmouth—they smack of captains and ships. Water is terribly alive. This place is dead. It's all dead.”
These were the last words Claude Rains ever gave to an interviewer for publication.
The biographical project stalled because of Rains's failing health, and Root never finished his book proposal. He groused to himself on some of the tapes in which he dictated research transcriptions, complaining of the project's lack of funding. In March 1967, while vacationing in Capri, he suffered a massive heart attack and was airlifted to a hospital in Naples, where a second heart attack proved fatal. He was forty-three years old. Rains covered his own distress at the loss of a cherished confidante and his biographical project by flippantly telling his daughter that Root, who was homosexual, had probably been pushed into a Italian canal by some jealous lover. A veteran, Root was given a stateside military funeral.
Two months later, Rains collapsed in his garden and was taken to Lakes Region Hospital in Laconia. Jessica was contacted and rushed to New Hampshire. “I was told he was bleeding,” she said. “I went up and stayed in a little hotel just down the street from the hospital. He was very brittle, very little. The very last thing he said to me was to go home and that he was going home, too. ‘Get me my hat and get me my shoes, I'm getting out of here.’ And two days later the doctor called me in New York and said, ‘Your father is in a coma and won't live.’ It was impossible to travel overnight because of limited transportation to Laconia, and I asked him if it would make any difference if I came up in the daytime. He said my father wouldn't recognize me in any case. He called back at 5:30 in the morning to tell me my father had passed away.”
Claude Rains died on May 30, 1967, of an intestinal hemorrhage subsequent to liver failure. Jessica requested a cremation, but no facilities were available in the small New Hampshire town. She discovered that her father had designed his own tombstone. It would match Rosemary's and carry an inscription from a poem by Richard Monckton Milnes:
All things once
Are things forever,
Soul, once living,
Lives forever.
Rains had abandoned an attempt to convert to Catholicism, Rosemary's faith, but her priest nonetheless officiated at his funeral. Jessica, who had no black wardrobe to speak of, wore white instead. “It was surreal,” she said. “A very lonely spot with a few close friends attending. I think there were eleven people at the tiny funeral in the little chapel.”
Rains left an estate of approximately $400,000, including a trust fund for his daughter and a $25,000 bequest to the Actors Fund of America.
Following the burial, Jessica returned to the house, where she met a woman who had not attended the service. She introduced herself as a “friend.” Jessica vaguely remembered her father mentioning this woman, who was a schoolteacher. After offering her condolences, the woman asked a favor, which Jessica granted. Would it be possible for her to have one of Claude's nightshirts as a keepsake? It would remind her of their happy times together.
Like many, Claude Rains died leaving behind loose ends and unrealized dreams. Among his papers was the final shooting script of My Fair Lady. Watching Stanley Holloway charmingly strut and sing his way through “With a Little Bit O’ Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” one finds it easy to imagine Rains even more charmingly essaying the role of Eliza Doolittle's father, a role he coveted. The producers, he said, wondered if he could “handle” a Cockney accent. “But I am a Cockney!” he protested. He had cultivated such an elegant voice, it's not surprising if he wasn't quite believed. One also can't help wondering what Rains would have done, earlier on, with another Shavian role, that of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion.
John Gielgud admired Rains's achievements in Hollywood, but felt the stage suffered a great loss when Rains abandoned the theatre for the screen before having claimed some of the great classical roles as his own. And indeed one can only imagine Rains's interpretations of Iago, Macbeth, Richard II (one of his favorites), Richard III—or even Lear, had he the stamina in his later years. (“You have to be superhuman,” Rains once said of Lear. “All that madness!”) Not long before his death, Rains told Jonathan Root that he had always yearned to play in The Merchant of Venice on Broadway and believed his daughter Jessica was talented enough to play Shylock's rebellious daughter (also named Jessica) opposite him. But he never told this to his daughter, despite her own aspirations in theatre and film. He knew the often heartbreaking vicissitudes of the acting life and was fiercely protective of his only child.
Unlike many once distinguished, but now forgotten, character actors, Claude Rains's reputation has only deepened. It is almost inconceivable that some of his best work—in Casablanca, for instance—received only perfunctory notice by the reviewers of the time, while today every nuance of that performance is indelibly etched into the minds of cinephiles everywhere. That he never won an Academy Award remains a crime, but the respect for his professionalism and craftsmanship continues unabated. Vincent Sherman once observed, “He was an immaculate actor, clean, precise, and exact in everything he did. There was no floundering about until he got the feel of a role, but a studied analysis with a design in the background that built bit by bit until the total architecture became visible.”
That consummate architect of acting lingers still, from the ubiquity of Louis Renault's supremely cynical “I'm shocked, shocked…” (certainly one of the most quoted lines in movie history) to an invisible character on the television series Heroes who calls himself “Claude Rains,” to obsessively surreal homages in films like Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre and novels like Rick De Marinis's A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of Claude Rains and Dr. Tellenbeck, in which a mistreated Frankenstein-like creature names himself after Rains and escapes by disguising himself in bandages from head to foot (“I feel like Claude, moving through the countryside, beyond the rage and fear of the villagers. Beyond their tricks and bad dreams. And almost home”).
Four years after Rains's death, Bette Davis briefly hesitated when asked by Dick Cavett if Claude Rains had been a happy person. “As happy as…” she began; then, obviously moved by the question, rephrased her response. “As a group, I don't think actors are what I'd call happy people. I think we're very moody people. I think we have great ups and great downs.…If something turns out badly you're depressed for days. I think we're terribly peculiar that way, and rather lonely people, actually. So Claude I could not say was a happy person. He was witty, amusing, and beautiful, really beautiful. And thoroughly enchanting to be with. And brilliant.”
A few years later, after having introduced a potential Rains biographer to Bette Davis, Jessica received a summons from the diva herself. Davis was working in television in Culver City, in her decline, and long removed from her Warner Bros. heyday. Still, she could not forget Claude Rains.
“Close the door before we talk about Claude,” she said, in her famous, clipped cadences as Jessica entered her dressing room. Davis then proceeded to talk for two hours about people and studio intrigues of which Jessica had almost no comprehension. But Davis's unrequited passion for Jessica's father remained clear. Dr. Jaquith in Now Voyager, for instance—surely he and Charlotte Vale, Davis's character, eventually married, said Davis—as if the film characters were real people. She poured out anecdotes, jabbing the air with her trademark cigarette. Her memories of Rains bringing Jessica and her mother to the set of Now, Voyager to deflect her lust. Her personal crisis during the production of Mr. Skeffington, alleviated by Rains's support and professionalism. Her initial terror of his intensity on the set of Juarez. Deception ruined by the censors, and Rains's upstaging her in that film. Jessica, as a child, sworn to secrecy about the identity of her family's famous houseguest at Stock Grange. Rains's intelligence as an actor. His lack of temperament. His refusal to play the Hollywood game (“He never went to a goddamn premiere in his life!”). His elegance. His sex appeal—especially his sex appeal. The way he would automatically remove his horn-rimmed glasses the moment any pretty young thing set foot on the set. His subsequent, seemingly courtly, flirtations. Her own jealous certainty that Rains's dressing room, so far from the Pennsylvania farm in those Warners days, must have been “as busy as Gimbels at Christmas.” As for his drinking: “If only he would have let me get him drunk.”
When Davis's two-hour monologue about Claude Rains was finished, she turned to Jessica, batted her legendary eyes, and closed their meeting just as her screen rival Joan Crawford once did, so many years before.
“And now,” said Davis, with a final, thoroughly theatrical flourish, “you may go.”