You're Known by the Company You Keep

I was almost through Frank Langella’s Dropped Names before I realized all his brief encounters with the famous were reminiscences about people who had died … Frank makes them all seem so vivid and alive I never noticed they were obituaries  (or exposes that could not be regarded as libelous).  Obviously, some of these famous men and women are so well known that a reader remembers the times and circumstances of their deaths; others because they live on in legend and on the silver screen seem to be eternal icons.

I was almost two thirds of the way through the memoir before I realized how self-disclosive Frank was even when he seemed to intend on to only recount the characteristics of his friends and the special circumstances of their meeting, parting and discreetly doing other things in between.  Some of the names Frank drops are luminaries who simply cross his path – like Marilyn Monroe whom he sees on the street in New York City as a truant teenager escaping from New Jersey for the afternoon.  Those close encounters only show Frank’s luck and fortune.  

Other famous movie stars are portrayed with their flaws bared, but never viciously – Frank writes of Paul Newman’s eyes but more of his frailty.  Frank does not regard Paul as having much sex appeal despite his eyes because he never had “danger,” a quality that Frank believes is essential for a great actor (Palance, Cagney, Clift, Brando, Dean, McQueen are Frank’s personification of using one’s self-destructiveness to advance one’s art and conquests).  This last encounter shows Frank’s sensitivity and respect more than it shows Paul’s decline:   “… I turned around and looked into the baby blues I’d looked into some forty years earlier.  An old man now, face thin and ravaged, a beard for his next role, fine sparse hair blown around by the wind … I instinctively reached up to put his hair in place, smoothing it down with my fingers and making it neat.  I then moved my hands down to his cold cheeks and kissed them both.  He fixed me with a look of heartbreaking tenderness and I thought for a moment he might be fighting back tears.  There. Now you look like Paul Newman I said.  And what man wouldn’t want to look like Paul Newman.  It occurs to me no, as I write this, that perhaps he might have been that man.  Frank’s instincts outweigh his speculations, his hands defy his logic.

When Frank writes about what he liked in his friend Alan Bates, he discloses how his fellow actor imprinted him to aspire to the qualities he wanted to internalize:  “… Had Alan allowed himself the final call he so much deserved, he would have known how much they did adore him. He was a gentle, loving man whose humor, grace, kindness, and humanity constantly humbled me.  To watch him backstage as he struggled to his place before we took our curtain call together, clearly in pain and exhausted, then gather himself, smile at me across the way, and turn to fact the audience, was a lesson in gallantry I carry with me still.  No matter what, Alan was going to go on, not because the show must, but because his personal sense of integrity required it.  I’d give anything to have twenty minutes with him again.”

I only saw Frank on the stage once, in NYC when he appeared as Dracula.  I was at that point more interested in the Edward Gorey stage sets than in Frank as lead.  I never attended any performance at the Berkshire Playhouse or in Stockbridge despite their being a stone’s throw away.  Many of the actors Frank knew for decades became friends of his from his early career in these summer stock shows in Massachusetts.  That’s where he met Anne Bancroft.  This was an especially good chapter where the depth of their friendship resounds despite years apart.  He closes:  “…And when the death knell of cancer sounded inside her body, she managed to keep it a secret from most of her friends.  She did not reach out to me in her final years, and I was unaware of the extent of her illness … She died … I opened the French doors to (my) patio and walked out listening to the Pacific, remembering the night thousands of miles across it in Malibu that I had thrown away a close relationship with a woman who could be funny, warm, and smart, but a friend I could no longer endure (they argued when Frank told a story about her downing Valium with scotch before a performance which she vehemently denied).  Any relationship in which one party feels even the slightest sense of diminishment had become for me a relationship not worth enduring.  I did not so much regret my decision to pull away from her ultimately corrosive aura as I did bemoan the demons that held sway inside her; they becoming the friends she most listened to and believed.  I have never asked Mel if Annie found some respite during her illness in her final years.  I’m not certain that I want to hear the answer.”  I think Frank doesn’t want to find out he reached the wrong conclusion.  He can be a great friend, but a cool one.

The biography is rife with sex, recounting some stars' joy in hearing the dirtiest of jokes, and dealing openly with who was gay and who was seducing whom.  Frank admits himself regarding Raul Julia as his “boyfriend.”  Unlike Carole King’s Natural Woman which I found stale and flat in its adherence to strict chronology, Dropped Names, moves freely across countries and time; its structure is Frank’s conscious vehicle to tell his life story as reflections of those he knew.  

He lived in rarefied air.  He does not descend into the banal, never flaunting his own lusts, affairs, marriages or family life.  He calculates, he is “in role.”  Nonetheless, the reader becomes a fan, a part of the audience that he needs but cannot see.  Unlike Carole, there are no promotional shots or photographs of his younger self:  there he is on the back cover, a man in his 70s, 35 pound heavier that his Count Dracula days, but still with that Julius Caesar glorious head, now gray.  The last movie I saw him in, forgetting the title, the one with Liam Neesom and January Jones as spies in Berlin: ; Frank is the aging old school international bad guy spy, almost looking as large as Orson Welles, cold, calculating, righteous rage … portraying under the surface emotions only hinted at in the book.