Topic: Dropped Names: Famous Men And Women As I Knew Them by Frank Langella

[Svengarlic]

I'm a sucker for vintage Hollywood character assassination and Langella's book is full of it. Nothing scandalous, just his personal recollections on some famous folks, all dead now.

Anne Bancroft
He reserves particular ire for Bancroft: An elegant stage name, he says, which was "about as suited to her as Cuddles would have been to Adolf Hitler". He first met Bancroft in 1966 when they co-starred in a play.

Although they were close friends for two decades, Langella soon realized she was "consumed by a galloping narcissism that often undermined her talents".
She once told him how she had been in a New York department store when she saw a woman smiling at her. Bancroft felt "inexplicably attracted to the woman and wanted to go over and embrace and kiss her passionately",  until she realized she was looking in a mirror.... C'mon Frank! She had to be putting you on.

 

Yul Brynner
  No actor ever talked about himself so much, Langella recalls. And perhaps none had so little time for his fans.
The bald-headed actor, "never far from a full-length mirror"  once gave Langella and his former wife, Ruth, a lift in his 20ft-long white limo. On the drive, Brynner explained how he’d had a special lift, big enough to fit a car, installed in the Broadway theater where he was starring in The King and I
 
His chauffeur could drive straight in and spare the star from having to "deal with the public". Brynner even showed off a pair of blinding flash lights which he kept handy "in case blacks attack my car".



Rita Hayworth
Rita was 20 years older than him, almost permanently drunk and suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s. She was unable to remember her lines unless they were written in huge block letters and placed next to the camera.
But Langella, then 34, still fell for his co-star, and they began a passionate affair together on the set of the little-remembered 1972 Western called "The Wrath Of God".
The couple, playing mother and son in the film, spent every evening together in her rooms, working their way through endless bottles of bourbon and wine as she reminisced mournfully about the good old days.

"Don’t stare at me, baby. You can see me in the movies," she told him loftily one night, but when he left her for the last time after several weeks, Hayworth ran out to the car and pleaded: "Don’t leave me. I gotta have a man with me"!



Tomorrow: Liz and Dick

 

[Svengarlic]

Richard Burton
In the world described by Langella, Richard Burton was a "crashing bore" who liked to recite poetry in a drunken stupor. Burton similarly failed to impress, though this time the venue was Langella’s dressing room while he was starring in Dracula on Broadway in 1977.

Single-handedly polishing off a bottle of Scotch which he had offered nobody else, a slurring Burton launched into a series of reminiscences about Britain’s great theatre actors and recited lengthy sections of Dylan Thomas’s poetry.
 
"As the hours wore on, I just wanted to get home. Could anyone, I wondered, be so unaware of what a crashing bore he had become? There sat a man approximately 52 years of age, looking ten years older, dressed in black mink, with heavily applied pancake, under a tortured, balding helmet of greasy jet black hair, grandly reciting tiresome poetry".

At least, says Langella, Burton wasn’t terrified of playing roles that might make audiences question his heterosexuality, unlike Rex Harrison and Laurence Olivier. He told him he had tried homosexuality once but didn’t like it.


 
Liz Taylor

Put in touch with her in 2001 by a mutual friend who said the she was desperately lonely, Langella reveals that their second date culminated in Taylor, then 69,  urging him to: "Come on, baby, and put me to sleep." After having to help her upstairs rather indecorously by pushing on her backside, he was taken aback by the clutter in her bedroom.

It was filled with pictures of her dead ex-husbands, dozens and dozens of bottles of witch hazel which she used to remove her make-up and a giant open box of chocolates on the bed.
Despite knowing that a relationship with her was ‘quicksand’, he began a brief affair.
He says she was: "A small, sweet woman who wanted a man to be with her, protect her and fill a void as deep as the deepest ocean." At one stage, she told him she wanted to leave Los Angeles and move with him to the East Coast of America to find a place that’s normal, but Langella told her a relationship would never work because she would "have him for lunch".



With son Michael Wilding

Tomorro: JFK and Jackie O.

 

 
 

[Svengarlic]

 Jackie O.
He is vague about the extent of his relationships with other famous women who crossed his path, notably Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the first woman he knew ‘for whom money is an aphrodisiac’.
   Contrary to her image as shy and fragile, she ‘relished’ her fame and knew exactly how to market it, he says. Langella has yet to reveal why, after so many years, he has decided to scratch away the veneer that still coats so many famous names, but perhaps he wants to prove that even the brightest stars have human foibles like the rest of us.

Langella recalls how Laurence Olivier once boasted about his impressive figure as a youth, revealing that one of his fantasies had once been "to be standing in a museum and have people pay to worship my naked form". Olivier, Langella concluded, could be ‘charming, delightful and admirable’ but was also a ‘deadly cobra capable of striking without notice’.

Other thespian egotists exposed by Langella include Anthony Quinn, whose huge self-importance Langella liked to prick by always saying ‘Hi’ to him, an informality he knew infuriated Quinn so much that each time he would then refuse to talk to him.

And then there was Charlton Heston, a great movie star who thought he was also a great actor when, in Langella’s estimation, he was a "piece of wood".
Langella says the Ben Hur star had such an enormous ego that he would always greet fellow guests at a party as if he was the host. Langella last encountered him at a dinner honoring Olivier. After the audience sat through a long speech from Heston that was effectively a homage to himself, Langella looked down to find his dinner companion, Maggie Smith, was squeezing his hand so hard her knuckles were white.

When Tony Curtis said out loud to their table: "Doesn’t Chuck make great speeches?", Dame Maggie replied with true Downton Abbey acidness: "Oh yes. He should never be allowed to do anything else."



   Langella knew Curtis for 30 years, and aside from "the absurdity of his desperate attempts to look cool, hip and young", he admired a ruthless honesty that once prompted him to lament at a dinner party at Julie Andrews’s home how his one-time idol Cary Grant was a "fucking bore" who "sucked the air out of any room he was in". Apparently, plenty of people in Hollywood agreed.

Next: Paul Newman




 


 


 

[Big Chief Apumtagribonitz]

Good, juicy stuff, Svengarlic, my man.  I'm going to look for the book.

[Svengarlic]

Good, juicy stuff, Svengarlic, my man.  I'm going to look for the book.

Glad you like it. BTW, I know you've been asked this before, but what's the deal with your screen name? I can't figure it out!

JFK : Who would have thought his idea of a perfect afternoon was listening to Noel Coward telling dirty jokes and belting out Mad Dogs And Englishmen on the piano? But a 24-year-old Langella was there to see it during a Cape Cod lunch party.
He was so shocked by the President’s "fast and furious" belly laughs at Coward’s witty jokes that he feared the Pres would have a heart attack.

Later, he watched in awe as, with Secret Service men staring impassively from every doorway, JFK jumped onto a coffee table to dance as Coward played his most famous tunes and Jackie Kennedy sang along, knowing all the lyrics by heart. Before boarding his helicopter, JFK turned to Langella and asked "What do you think, Frank? Should I keep my day job?"

I can pretty much verify Frank's take on Paul Newman. I ran across him several times in the eighties when I was in the race car business, working in the High California Dessert at Willow Springs Raceway. I'm not the star struck type (would you believe it?) so I never said a word to him. But I was around when he talked to others. Newman was pretty dull, in contrast to most stars that act like they're on camera all the time. If he HAD a personality, he kept it well hidden.

Anyway, according to Langella, Newman, long regarded as one of Hollywood’s Mr Nice Guys, was a frightful bore. "After dirty-sexy jokes, shop talk, cars or politics were exhausted, Paul was a pretty dull companion," he recalls. "Never rude or unkind, just dull." In awe of his good looks, companions would instinctively think it their fault when he suddenly went quiet.
    The reality, says Langella, was that he had simply run out of anything to say. Like the statue of David, Newman was "physically perfect but emotionally vacant".

Not all of Langella's revelations are negative. He visited Elsa Lanchester after Charles' death, and of course, found her quite charming. She had no problem talking about what a queen her late husband was.



Langella had a little known 5 year affair with Whoopi Goldberg, and he says little of it. But then, she's not dead.

Coming in the final installment: Rex Harrison



 
 

 

[Big Chief Apumtagribonitz]

No, I've never been asked.  When Moe and Larry dress up as Indians in , I think, Back to the Woods,  Moe introduces Larry as Big Chief Apumtagribonitz.  I myself think it's spelled Apumptagribbonitz, but that was too many letters for the space.

[Svengarlic]

No, I've never been asked.  When Moe and Larry dress up as Indians in , I think, Back to the Woods,  Moe introduces Larry as Big Chief Apumtagribonitz.  I myself think it's spelled Apumptagribbonitz, but that was too many letters for the space.

Aha! Could the last part of the name be Rabinovitz, a much used comic sounding Hebrew name?

[Big Chief Apumtagribonitz]

Just sounds like double-talk to me.

[Svengarlic]

Langella admits he had looked up to the stars of the British stage since a boy, only to be disappointed when he met them. And there was no more crushing disappointment, it seems, than Rex Harrison.
At their first meeting, at a theatrical agent’s cocktail party, Langella was about to congratulate him on his performance in My Fair Lady and reached out to shake hands.



He was just telling Sir Rex what a great honor it was to meet him when the British star cut him dead: "Thank you", he said, flinging his coat over Langella’s outstretched hand and marching into the main room of the party. It didn’t seem to be an unintentional slight.
    Years later, Langella recalls, he sought out Harrison backstage at a theater where he was performing and (undaunted by their previous encounter) delivered an impassioned speech on how Sir Rex had inspired him since he was a boy.
    Harrison stood and listened. "Thank you. Very kind. I’m afraid I can’t ask you to sit down," he said, and with that Langella found himself back in the corridor.

Another thespian egotist exposed by Langella was Anthony Quinn, whose huge self-importance Langella liked to prick by always saying"‘Hi" to him, an informality he knew infuriated the star of Zorba The Greek so much that each time he would then refuse to talk to him.

That's all, thanks for reading.