Dropped Names by Frank Langella Read Free Book Online Page B

understudy had acquitted himself admirably.
    â€œIt was an understudy,” I said. “I thought he did very well.”
    â€œI want to meet him.”
    I asked my dresser to fetch the young actor. Richard poured another drink as I continued wiping off the residue of my makeup and Suzy made small talk with my wife, who’d come to get a look-see. The three of us did not talk nor were we offered a drink.
    A knock at the door and in came Sam, the understudy.
    Richard did not rise. Sam came up to meet him, excited and nervous.
    â€œMarvelous,” Richard said. “I’m doing Lear on Broadway next season. I want you to play the Fool.”
    It was, of course, going to be a great story: Understudy Catches Burton’s Eye! On to Stardom! I knew the actor playing Renfield was going to be miserable when he heard of it, but Sam might, after all, become the Shirley MacLaine of the 1977–78 Broadway season. Shirley had been raised from Chorus Girl to Movie Stardom after going on for the star in the musical The Pajama Game.
    After he left, I asked Richard a question that may have been close to the last words I uttered for the next two hours. As the level of liquor lowered in the bottle, he began a series of reminiscences about Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, and other theatrical luminaries, and then launched into reciting lengthy sections of Dylan Thomas. By the time the bottle was near empty, so was my brain. The sonorous voice, now slurring its words, had succeeded in numbing and stunning me. Could anyone, I wondered, be so unaware of what a crashing bore he had become? There sat a man approximately fifty-two years of age, looking ten years older, dressed in black mink, with heavily applied pancake, under a tortured, balding, helmet of jet-black dyed hair, grandly reciting tiresome poetry.
    It was well past 1 a.m. when the night watchman knocked on my dressing room door. The first and only time he’d needed to do that in the year I played Dracula .
    â€œI’m sorry, Mr. Langella, but I’ve got to shut down the lights and close up the theatre now.”
    I was still in my robe and slippers, and as I managed to quickly change into street clothes, Richard launched into yet another poem. Suzy and my wife had long since dried up on small talk and were sitting stupefied on the couch, facing straight ahead. As I grabbed my coat, they leapt up, and we all four made our way out of my dressing room. The ladies preceded us through the dimly lit backstage toward the street, no doubt aching for a nap in the backseats of our waiting limos. When Richard and I got to about center, he stopped, lifted up the rope slung across the back of the stage and headed toward its apron.
    Although terrified that he might recite a monologue from some obscure Irish play, I nevertheless ducked under the rope and joined him at the edge of the stage. And there we stood, staring out over the empty house, the standing lamp dead center reflecting on one of the most famous faces of the era. A once young Welsh buck primed to take Olivier’s crown, now looking more like a successor to some aging Italian fashionista about to present the best of his collection; and, in the glow of the single lamplight appearing even more surreal than he had in my dressing room.
    He seemed melancholy and pensive. A colleague, I thought, anxious to return to the boards as the great King Lear. I had never forgotten his brilliant performance as King Arthur in the musical Camelot , and his early promise as a major force in the English theatre. Maybe his return as Lear would be a way of undoing the last two decades of debauchery, booze, lousy movies, and Elizabeth Taylor, his second and third wife, I thought. He stared intently out into the dark.
    â€œHow many seats in this house?” he said.
    â€œAbout eleven hundred,” I answered.
    â€œHmmm,” he said. “Can’t gross enough for me.”
    Then he turned, walked upstage, and we