Dropped Names (17 page)

LORETTA YOUNG

I
never knew who I was going to find sitting at the counter of the small bar in the home of my friend Ronald Neame, the cameraman turned producer/director of so many wonderful films of the 1930s and '40s. He had been a collaborator of Noel Coward and David Lean and became most famous for directing
The Poseidon Adventure
, the film he liked to say gave him his
Fuck You Money
. He collected “the old dames” as he called them; actresses like Glynis Johns, Maureen O'Hara, and the great film editor Anne Coates. On this particular night in the early 1990s, on the stool close to the wall at the bar sat one of the greatest of the great dames, the legendary Miss Loretta Young.

The moment I saw her, I instantly looked up to see if Ronnie had set up a special key light for that stool. So remarkable was her aura and her beauty, you automatically felt that you were standing on the dark side of the camera watching her through a flattering lens. She was in no way theatrical, did not seem to be playing for attention, but radiated, almost more than anyone I have ever met, the aura of a Movie Star.

She had her hands gently wrapped around a glass of wine and was quietly talking to Ronnie, who was behind the bar. As his wife introduced me to the other guests, I caught her briefly glance at me.

I shook hands with them, all the while trying to find my way into her light.

“Loretta, this is our good friend Frank Langella. Be careful or he'll bite your neck.”

One of Ronnie's social gifts was his ability to drop a credit of yours when introducing you to give the conversation a starting-off point. He was, of course, referring to my
Dracula
role onstage and in film. He might just as well have said:

“Be careful, or he'll slap your face.”

Miss Young turned slightly, lifted her beautiful hand, and said in a polite and vaguely dismissive manner:

“Hello, how are you?” then lowered her eyes and returned to Ronnie.

I've never known a beautiful woman, either intimately or as a friend, who was unaware of her beauty and who wasn't in some way a slave to it. But Miss Young wore hers like a halo: radiant and definitive; as was her staunchly Catholic faith. She was dressed impeccably in something soft and feminine with an elegant print. Small, almost fragile earrings, the appearance of minimal makeup, her hair, colored to a pale shade of grayish brown and styled simply, was pulled back in a small chignon. She was at that time somewhere in her late seventies, breathtaking, with a kind of ladylike sexuality I found very attractive.

In addition to her many screen performances that I'd seen, I had religiously watched her successful TV series in the 1950s,
The Loretta Young Show
, in which at each opening and closing she descended a staircase or swept through a pair of doors, always impeccably groomed and flawlessly working her gowns. In every half-hour segment, she played a different character—plain or fashionable, even Chinese once. Always an intelligent, thoughtful, and proficient actress, her real magic came with her beauty and her focus. She had the gift of conviction and a reputation for a shrewdness as shrewd as any Hollywood mogul.

Years earlier I had made a TV film in which one of my colleagues was Alexis Smith, the beautiful, statuesque actress who played in dozens of films in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Alexis and her husband, Craig Stevens, invited me to their house on Fountain Avenue in L.A., which they had purchased from Loretta. Alexis described to me how, after they had agreed on a price, Loretta, with a yellow legal pad in hand, walked her through the house pointing out built-in things like Shoji screens and saying:

“Now, will you be wanting those?”

And when Alexis said, “Well, yes,” Loretta quoted a price and marked it on the pad. The day Alexis and Craig took possession they drove up to the front door to find that Loretta had left them the two giant peach trees that stood on either side, but had removed the huge terra-cotta pots they'd resided in.

Once inside they found the house immaculately clean and “the largest grandest bouquet of flowers I'd ever seen on the living room floor, with a magnum of champagne and a note: ‘Hope you'll be as happy here as we've been. Love, Loretta.' ”

When Alexis went into the master bathroom she found a hole in the floor where the commode had been.

“She left me a bottle of champagne,” she laughed, “but not a pot to piss in.”

I
f Miss Young was in any way interested in talking with me, she was playing it very cool through the meal, giving most of her time to the man on her left, an old friend of hers, and to the guests across the narrow table. Sitting on her right, I did not press or flatter. I waited.

It was at dessert that she turned and focused on me entirely.

“Ronnie tells me you write as well.”

“Yes.”

“Would I have read anything?”

“Well, I recently published an article in the
New York Times
about actors and their demons.”

“I'd love to read it. Will you send it to me? Ronnie will give you my address.”

“Of course.”

For the rest of the dinner she was mine. Totally attentive, charming, and funny. I was, of course, dying to ask her about Clark Gable, the alleged father of her daughter Judy, whom she had publicly claimed was adopted. But I didn't go anywhere near the subject of sex. Not because I sensed she was a proper, uptight lady, but because she created an intimacy between us that transcended it. She never once touched my hand or flirted or made any sort of suggestive remark. It was as if we were at a retreat or a bird-watch, observing and discussing the finer things of life.

At one point I quoted her my favorite line from the little homilies she read to the audience at the end of her television show. She would always hold a small book in her hand and say something to wrap up the evening. This night it went something like:
Mistakes are like knives. They can hurt you or help you depending on how you pick them up.

She had no memory of it, of course.

“But it's true, isn't it?” she said.

At the end of her TV show, she would gently close the little book, look right into the camera and say, “Good night. See you next week?” Putting that statement in the form of a question seemed to me the essence of her charm.

I did ask her if the famous story about the collection box on her film
Come to the Stable
was true. Legend had it that she and Celeste Holm, who were both playing nuns, had decided no one on the set should curse and if they did they would have to drop a quarter in a little box, the proceeds of which went to the church.

The story was that Jerry Lewis or Danny Kaye or Ethel Merman (depending upon who told it) heard about it, came on the set, walked over to her and the box, and said:

“Here's fifty bucks, Loretta. Go fuck yourself.”

I discreetly asked if there had been that kind of incident.

“Oh, he missed the point. [I think she said it was Kaye.] Celeste and I were only referring to taking the Lord's name in vain, not to curse words.”

We got up from the table and she drifted toward other guests. A beautiful, smart, wily, and deeply religious woman and yet still one could imagine Gable saying, “Come off it, Loretta, and get over here.”

T
he next day, I sent her the article and a few days later I received a note from her in which she told me that she couldn't find herself among the different types of troubled actors I'd encountered and writing that perhaps the greatest problem she'd had during the course of her career was that Bette Davis had gotten all the parts she felt should have come to her.

After reading that concern, I was reminded that we had met before in 1976. I was appearing as a talking lizard in Edward Albee's
Seascape
at the now-defunct Shubert Theater in Los Angeles. Word came back that Miss Young was in the audience and after a visit with Deborah Kerr, our star, she would like to say hello. I waited a full forty-five minutes in my dressing room before she appeared in my doorway, said something like, “Lovely,” and drifted away.

“Was she with Deborah all this time?” I asked the stage manager.

“Oh, no,” he said, “she was in the costume room. She asked to have your lizard costume laid out on a table and she took a big piece of paper and copied the patterns on it and wrote down all the colors.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “she's always been very interested in clothes and is going to design a gown just like it.”

L
oretta spent her last years married to the great costume designer Jean Louis and living in Palm Springs in splendor. She had married him, according to Ronnie, to “protect his fortune” from others. He died first. She remained devoted to the Catholic Church. My friend Carol Channing lived nearby, saw her often, and said that even while dying she was still ethereally beautiful.

The Iron Butterfly
, as she had been nicknamed in Hollywood, fluttered her last, and gently passed out of existence at the age of eighty-seven. No doubt welcomed into the arms of her God, whose name she had never spoken in vain and whose forgiveness she must have sorely wanted.

Her daughter passed away just this year and the sad story of her mother refusing to admit to the world that she'd actually birthed her and Judy's pain and suffering over it, stands as a testament to a woman who, it would seem, valued artifice and religion far more than the love and comfort of her own child.

ROGER VADIM

S
omewhere around 1967, I was in Rome and invited by my friend, actor John Phillip Law, to visit the set of his new film,
Barbarella
. He was shooting it with Jane Fonda at the Cinecitta Studios, directed by Roger Vadim and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. John and Jane, both at their most beautiful and fuckable, were floating high in the air on harnesses. He was playing an archangel with giant wings, and Jane, hot as a pistol in a skintight something, was clinging to his half-naked body.

I had, at that point, never been on a movie set and the atmosphere seemed to me incredibly casual and easy. There was much wine being poured, great camaraderie, and a total lack of tension. I don't ever remember hearing Vadim call
action
or
cut
. At the end of the afternoon shoot, John dropped the wings, and Jane left with Vadim, her lover and soon-to-be husband. As we were driving back to Rome for dinner I said to John, “I had no idea a movie set could be so relaxed. Is it always like that?”

“No,” he said. “We ran out of film early this morning and Roger didn't want Dino to know, so we were just pretending.”

S
ome twenty years later, Roger was directing me in an extremely explicit love scene opposite the exquisite Rebecca de Mornay. It was the 1988 remake of
And God Created Woman
, a huge success in the late 1950s starring the French actress Brigitte Bardot, directed by her soon-to-be husband Vadim. This time there was film in the camera and he wanted Rebecca and me to do it his way.

I had seen the original film while at college, and it is impossible to explain how overwhelmingly erotic that now rather tame picture was to young men. Brigitte Bardot, an erection machine of epic proportions, never spread her legs wide for the camera but offered herself up to it with delicious humor and mystery. Most college boys, myself included, found her to be the single most masturbatory fantasy among an admittedly heavy arsenal of choices. Her breathtaking loveliness was made more desirable by Roger's appreciation of how important fantasy and imagination are in the art of engendering real sensuality and passion.

That day Rebecca and I were to do one of our three sex scenes. After the lights were arranged, everyone was asked to leave the set so it was just the three of us and the cameraman. My motivation in the scene was to perform oral sex on Rebecca, as she sat atop a pool table in a recreation room in my character's mansion. Lots of wine and we settled in to a hard day's work. As my mouth moved down Rebecca's throat, across her breasts, onto her belly, and my tongue gently slid across her thighs toward her vagina, I could feel Roger's breath on me, just off camera, urging me onward.

“Yes, Frank, yes that's it. Caress, caress, soft kisses. Now tease it! Tease it! Take your time. Yes it's good—you like it, don't you? Now licka de pussy! Mmmm!”

Most of the time, sex scenes (which are thankfully no longer required of me in films) are exhausting and a bore to perform. They are usually self-consciously shot and crowded with makeup people, lighting guys, clapper boys, and the script girl reminding you when and how you faked your orgasm. Roger would have none of that.

Our faux ménage-à-trois continued through the rest of the day and several more, as Roger photographed me going down on Rebecca, she masturbating me in a Jacuzzi, and the two of us acting out sexual intercourse on a fur carpet in front of a roaring fire. Through it all, Roger never left our sides, urging, taunting, pushing us further and further. He wanted delirium. He wanted transcendence. He wanted orgasms. Sort of like a swimming instructor teaching you all the different strokes that can get you to shore.

Roger was not a particularly good director but I enjoyed his company and his sexual obsessions. I found his devotion to physical pleasure honest and exciting. He gave you the impression that if you were to knock on his door in the middle of the night, he'd accommodate any desire you might wish to indulge. He had with him at the time a very pleasant dark-haired woman, whose name I cannot recall but who seemed to love and understand him. There were explicit stories about Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve, three women, beautiful yes, but more importantly each unmistakable from the other and each a total original in looks and personality.

In his still thick French accent, which I found highly provocative, he held forth on womankind and sex in general. What was so much fun about him was his total immersion in and great amusement about the attitudes of the American male regarding it. He saw absolutely no reason for a male to outgrow discussing how one woman makes love as compared to another; or the size of her breasts or the tightness of her vagina. He did not see it as anti-female. Ungentlemanly, perhaps, but certainly not anti-female. I can still recall a 3 a.m. conversation in my trailer in which he suggested we make separate lists of our top ten blow jobs from famous women and then compare them as to expertise, duration, and repeat vendors. Again, ungentlemanly but definitely not anti-female. Women are certainly not shy about comparing male performance or penis size, and don't consider it anti-male. Only recently I was sitting in a makeup trailer listening to my world-famous costar telling her young makeup girl the best way to pleasure her boyfriend during oral sex with the artful use of her finger. This luscious lady would have enjoyed my conversations with Vadim as much as I did.

Roger's devotion to Bardot, Fonda, and Deneuve as women, and to their careers, was total and fully committed, and he managed while doing it, to retain his easy masculinity. After one of the marathon sex scenes, Roger and I ended up at the hotel bar where we were shooting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, once again, the topic was sex:

“You Americans are all pussy-whipped,” he said. “You're afraid of your women; you're afraid of their passion. Women only want one thing. They want to be desired. And it's when we no longer desire them that they want our balls on a platter. I'd rather die fucking them than live being fucked by them.”

And why wouldn't he? His taste was exquisite. The women he chose were not eye candy, airheads, or interchangeable generics. Secure enough to partner with strong, individual women, he set an example as a man who could love beauty, brains, talent, sex appeal, and strength in one woman.

W
hen Roger passed away at the age of seventy-two it was heartening to see his former wives and lovers attending his funeral. There they all were, most likely fondly remembering how much he had desired them. For however long the relationships with each of them lasted, he had been clearly doing something right.