Patricia Neal sat on a big yellow blanket in an old chair with the bottom falling out of it and grinned. Watching Patricia Neal grin is like tasting ice cream for the very first time. There is no grin like it anywhere. It starts casually, down deep inside where the clockwork is, winds its way slowly up, catching on around the lips, then pauses, connecting along the way with some part of the brain that thinks sunny thoughts, and finally breaks wide open, letting in the world or the room or wherever she happens to be when she’s grinning, and everybody feels at home. In a life full of minus signs, it’s been a big plus, that grin.
“Mind you, I wasn’t always this happy,” she said in her tiny dressing room in the back of an old warehouse on West 26th Street where she was between shots on The Subject Was Roses, the first movie she has made since she suffered those three hideous near-fatal strokes three years ago. “When I recovered from nearly dying, I hated life. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I hated the nurse, I hated my husband Roald Dahl, who had to do all the housework and take care of all four of the children, I hated God, I lost all contact with religion, I really resented everything and everyone for letting me live to be a vegetable. I hated life for a year and a half, then I started learning how to be a person again and now I’ve loved life for a year and a half. And I love it a lot.”
She waved a goodbye kiss to Pat Hingle, an old friend who had dropped by for lunch served in plastic bags and paper cups, then sat down again and lit up a menthol cigarette. She was wearing an orange dress and an old brown sweater thrown over her shoulders and her hair was tied up in a brown scarf. It was a far cry from the glamorous days on Hollywood movie sets when she was the hottest thing since peanut butter, but only one thing seemed important: Pat Neal was working again. The illness has left her with a slight limp and when she speaks the words form slowly and sometimes get twisted around her tongue like bacon around a fork, a fault she covers up by becoming veddy British (“married” comes out “maddied,” etc.). Otherwise, she’s the same staunch, valiant head-held-high lady she always was. Maybe better. A new strength has crept in where an elegant Kentucky-born, Tennessee-bred softness used to reign. “Coming back to New York was my husband’s idea. I didn’t choose this film, he did. You know, Frank Gilroy wrote it for me to play on the stage, but it came at the time when my little daughter Olivia died and I was too upset to do a play. But they held out for me when it came time to do the film, waiting to see if I would be well enough to do it. So Roald just signed me up without even asking me if I wanted to do it and now I’m glad he did, because I think it’s the best film I’ve ever made. I think I like it even better than Hud or Face in the Crowd, which are my other two favorites. And I tell you, being back in New York is the best therapy in the world for me. I was pretty scared, let me tell you. I didn’t know if I could do it or not. I can’t learn lines anymore. They just go right out of my head. My illness just wiped out my memory. I didn’t even know my husband’s name when I came to, or the names of any of my children. I still can’t remember the names of most of the films I was in or the names of people I worked with. I remember everything that ever happened to me in my life, even the things I’d like to forget, but the part of my brain that was injured is the part that remembers names. Oh, I remember The Fountainhead and The Breaking Point, but not the others. People come up to me and say, ‘I just loved you in The Hasty Heart, and I say, ‘Let me see now, which one was that?’ In The Subject Was Roses I have one four-page scene of dialogue where I talk to myself. It was very difficult. Valerie, my companion from Great Missenden, my village in England, came with me. At home Roald had six or eight friends a day dropping in from the village to help me with my lines, and now when I forget, Valerie helps me. She is one of the people who helped me most. She started me playing bridge again and she came with me last year when I made a fourteen-minute speech for brain-injured children at the—oh damn, I can’t remember the name of the hotel.”
“The Waldorf,” said Valerie.
“Oh yes, that big ugly one on Park Avenue. Everyone has helped me. People have been more wonderful to me than I ever dreamed. It sometimes takes a big blow like I got to make people re-evaluate the importance of human beings. On this film alone, I couldn’t have made it without everyone’s help. I love the actors, I love the producer, Edgar Lansbury, I love the director, Ulu Grosbard, I love my hairdresser, who comes from ten miles away from where I was raised in Tennessee. They’ve all helped me over the hurdles.”
And for Pat Neal, there have been a lot of hurdles. “Listen,” she is quick to point out, “my troubles didn’t begin with these strokes. So many rotten things have happened to me in my life that sometimes I think I was born under a very nasty star. Nobody else in my family has had the miserable luck I’ve had, so it’s not something that runs in my family. I left home when I was 18, and I haven’t lived with my family since, but we are very close. My mother is 68 years old and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. My sister lives in Atlanta and my younger brother is a teacher in—wait a minute, I’ll look up the name of the town in my address book, because I can’t remember—Wimberly, Texas. See? I can remember a lot of things. My father died of a heart attack in 1949. I came to New York from Tennessee and met Eugene O’Neill, who didn’t use me in the play I auditioned for, but he liked me enough to get me into something else and a lot of people saw me there and I got to understudy in The Voice of the Turtle and on closing night I got a telegram to do the Lillian Heilman play, Another Part of the Forest. I didn’t want to do that play, I wanted to do John Loves Mary, which Richard Rodgers was producing. I remember he wouldn’t give me the money I wanted and I got so mad I told him Lillian Heilman wanted me for her play and he just told me to go ahead and do it. I love him, but he was the stingiest man I ever met. Anyway, I did the Hellman play and that’s what got me to Hollywood, where I bet you can’t guess what my first movie was. It was John Loves Mary and I was very bad in it. I had been very happy in New York. I lived in an apartment with four friends, then in a fifth-floor walkup with Jean Hagen on Lexington Avenue that didn’t even have a kitchen or a john and we used to take baths a block away at a friend’s house. The happiest part of my life has always revolved around this town. My troubles began when I went to Hollywood. I started going with Gary Cooper and ended up in analysis. When we broke up, I went to a woman psychiatrist in Philadelphia and nearly had a nervous breakdown. Then I ended up in Atlanta and hid out there for six months in my sister’s house and went to a wonderful psychiatrist who saved my sanity and got me in shape to go back to work. I came back to New York and did Lillian Heilman’s play—I can’t remember the name—”
“It was The Children’s Hour,” said Valerie.
“Oh yes, The Children’s Hour. That’s when I met Roald. You see, this interview is doing me a lot of good. It’s making me remember. Let’s see. Oh yes, I couldn’t wait to get pregnant, but after we were married I couldn’t have any children, so I went to a doctor who blew up my tubes—well, my darlin’, that’s what they do, you know—women are so complicated—and then they started coming right and left. Now we’re going to stop. No more children. I don’t think I could stand the pain of watching misfortunes happen to any more children. First there was Theo, who was hit by a taxi and we didn’t think he’d live. The poor little thing lived in a critical condition for two years with a tube in his head to drain the fluid from his brain. He’s eight now and he’s going to be all right. He has a hole in his arm and bless his heart, he keeps breaking it all the time. But at least he will live. Then there’s Ophelia, who is 4, and Tessa, the eldest, who is 11, and the baby, Lucy, who was born two years ago during my strokes. We didn’t know if she would live either. My daughter Olivia died of the measles when she was 13 and there was nothing anyone could do. It was one of those terrible fluke accidents. Then my mother-in-law died suddenly. Then I went to California to make a film for John Ford and we had just started shooting when I had the first stroke. I was pregnant with Lucy and if I had not had a husband like Roald I would not be alive today and neither would the baby. He had been discussing Theo’s brain injury with this brain surgeon who was my agent’s brother-in-law. We had met him at a cocktail party, and I remember thinking, ‘I hope he never has to operate on me!’ When I became paralyzed, Roald recognized the symptoms, picked up the phone and called him, and they rushed me into surgery in Los Angeles. Only quick thinking saved me. They didn’t think I’d have any brain left when I got off the operating table.
“At first I simply refused to get out of bed. I hated everyone and wanted to die. They treated me like a child. I was forced to say the alphabet. I had to learn all over again how to spell and how to say dog and cat and hello. I tell you, I was a vegetable, that’s the only word for it. But something happens to you, I guess. You just accept what has happened to you and you get stronger and stronger. Everyone was so kind. Mildred Dunnock and Betsy Drake took care of my children before we left California for England. I went to a swimming pool in a military hospital every day to learn how to use my limbs again. People donated their time, and it was all free. I never had to pay for anything but my leg massages and my therapist. And I don’t know what I’d do without all the insurance we had through Actors Equity and the Screen Actors Guild. We can’t get sick again, any of us. We’ve used up all the insurance. I wore a cast and my legs were held in by big leather braces until recently, but now I’m fine. Working in this movie and being back in New York again, seeing all my old friends, has done more than any braces could do. It has proved to me I can carry a work load again. I don’t take any medicine or pills and I even drink better than I used to.” A wide grin breaks out like a June morning. “And I love cocktails. I love martinis and old-fashioneds, but I love martinis the best. I also smoke too much, but I can’t stop. I once had a doctor who couldn’t stand cigarettes and he always warned me and lectured me about smoking. He died of lung cancer two years ago and he didn’t even smoke. I tried to quit once, for an entire week, and I cried for seven days. The first thing I remember when I woke up from the operations was seeing this blurry figure looking out the window smoking a cigarette. It was Roald. I didn’t even know who he was, but I reached my hand out for his cigarette and now he says that was the first sign he had that I would be all right. Now I just try to carry on with my life as normally as possible. I have to dance in the movie and although they wouldn’t let me see the rushes, they tell me I was fine. Do you have a light?”
They were calling her for makeup. Melvyn Douglas was arriving at three to say hello. It was a busy afternoon and time to leave. “My darlin’, my darlin’, listen to me and remember something. All of these rotten things that have happened to me have certainly changed my outlook on life. But I look around me at all the crime and the terrible things people do to each other and it makes me wonder if the world is going straight to hell. If only I could tell people how lucky they are. I’ve learned to love people and life again and I’ve learned there is definitely something bigger than all of us up there or out there somewhere that keeps us going. I am not Joan of Arc of 1968 and I sure as hell don’t want anyone to think I’m a martyr. I’m opinionated and sassy. They tell me Ronald Reagan may get into the White House. If that happens, I swear I’ll give up my citizenship. I hope the last has happened to me for the rest of my life, but my point is I had to have a severe blow to make me learn how to care all over again, after I had forgotten how. That’s the one thing I got out of all this. I don’t think I will ever forget again.”
Outside, green buds were poking out on the grimy trees growing out of the dirty cement. Grips and electricians and even the tired studio cop guarding the warehouse entrance chatted gaily. A warm breeze blew the skirts of the girls in their spring dresses. Maybe I’m crazy, but it looked like people were smiling. And why not? Patricia Neal was back. It was a lovely thing to smile about.