Dropped Names Read online

  I started out about 11 a.m. on Sunday and found the place much quicker than I had anticipated. When I pulled into the gravel driveway in my hand-me-down Ford station wagon in front of a beautiful gray and white house, I entered a world I had never before experienced. It was as if the matching gray and white pebbles had been arranged on the ground one-by-one and the house had been freshly painted that morning. Even the colors of the flowers seemed brighter and their shapes more perfect than any of the forsythia bushes growing wild around my little house in Bayonne, New Jersey. This was Osterville, Cape Cod, a paradise for the privileged, but a strange and magical mystery to me.

  Dressed in khakis and an open shirt, my hair long and unkempt, pre-Beatles-style, I sat in the car not certain what to do next. But the front door opened and standing there was a figure the likes of whom I had never seen before, who quickly solved my dilemma.

  I got out and walked over to him. “Hi. Liza asked me to lunch. Am I very early?” He stood there with a countenance that displayed neither warmth nor disdain but an enigmatic stare that instantly made me want him to like me. He was a black man of indeterminate age, dressed in a white jacket, black pants, black shiny shoes, and white gloves. He did not answer my question. “Please come in, Mr. Langella. Miss Eliza is not down yet but she left word that when you arrived you might like to have a swim.” “Oh, I didn’t bring a suit.” “I’m sure you’ll find some hanging on hooks down by the beach house. Help yourself.”

  He walked me through the spacious, understatedly elegant house, to a large patio, and down a stone path set into a beautifully manicured lawn, toward a tiny little blue and white house with sculpted white birds dotting its roof and a wooden dock meandering toward the water’s edge. “May I bring you something to drink, sir?” “No, thank you,” I said. And he left.

  At that time I doubt I weighed more than 160 pounds with a waist under thirty inches. None of the suits I found fit me so I did the best I could with one at least three sizes too big, by pulling its tie very tight and twisting the waistband into a bulky knot that immediately came undone once I jumped into the water and splashed around in the open sea.

  Seemingly out of nowhere came the sound of a helicopter overhead and I continued to float about, assuming it would pass by, although to where I couldn’t imagine. It soon became astonishingly clear that it wasn’t going anywhere but down toward the lawn of this house, and as it grew louder and came closer, I emerged from the water, clutching my suit with one hand and shielding my eyes from the sun with the other. Nearsighted from birth, I could just make out two figures waving at me from inside the chopper. It came to rest on the lawn just as Liza’s mother appeared from the house, her hand firmly atop her blue hat, followed by the black gentleman in the white gloves, whose name I would later learn was Buds. The blades began their slowdown and a door opened. The pilot jumped out, turned to extend his hand, and it was taken by the single most famous female hand in the world at that moment, Jackie Kennedy, dressed in a simple top and pants with two cameras slung around her neck. A moment later she was followed by the President, gingerly stepping out, smiling, and greeting Liza’s mom. “Hello, Jack,” she said, offering her cheek. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” She and Jackie kissed and hugged and the President turned in my direction. I had been slowly moving up the lawn, completely unaware that I was having an out-of-body experience. All I could focus on was those yellow pants.

  “Who’s this?” the President said with a big beaming smile.

  “This is Liza’s friend from the Playhouse,” said her mom. “Frank, this is the President and Mrs. Kennedy.”

  Liza and her stepfather had just reached the group as the President and Jackie shook my one free hand and Liza said, “Hello, Mr. President. We didn’t tell Frank you were the luncheon guests. We wanted to surprise him.” And amid the indulgent laughter Jackie said her first words to me after “hello,” in that world-famous whisper, “We’ll have to plot your revenge, won’t we?” As the group climbed up the lawn to the house, the President turned back and said, “Frank, I hope you’re going to change for lunch.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” Liza said as we headed back to the beach house, “because I thought you’d be too scared to come.” I changed back into my clothes, then sat on a blue and white chaise, as Liza stood behind me towel-drying my hair. “So, who are your parents?” “Mummy’s name is Rachel Lloyd, her nickname is Bunny, and after she divorced my father she married Paul Mellon. Jackie and Mummy are best friends and Jackie wanted to meet somebody so Mummy arranged a little lunch for them.” Why Mummy wasn’t pronounced Mommy, my New Jersey boy ears could not fathom.

  “Meet who?” I said.

  “Surprise.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Nope.”

  We walked up the lawn, my hair still damp and my heart beating slightly faster than usual. But the sight of the man I saw through the French windows standing inside the house stopped me cold. Regaling the President with a story that had him hysterical, standing taller than I had expected, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was Noel Coward. “Noel, this is Liza’s friend Frank from the Playhouse,” said the President. “How do you do,” said Sir Noel, “My, what a lot of hair.” The room exploded in laughter, not for the words but for the way in which he said them, dry as the Sahara.

  Riding the laugh, as if on cue, a hugely confident, brassy woman strode into the room. “Am I late?” she said. “Yes,” said the President. “Hello, Jack. Noelie, darling!” “Come here,” Coward said, “and give us a kiss.”

  “Who?” I said to Liza.

  “Adele Astaire,” she whispered back, “sister of Fred.”

  “How do you do, young man?” she said, shooting out her hand. “I’m Dellie.”

  So our little band was complete: Noel Coward, Adele Astaire, Paul Mellon, Bunny Mellon, Jacqueline Kennedy, Eliza Lloyd, me, and of course, the President of the United States. Lunch for eight, or as this rarefied set would call it: luncheon!

  I’ll tell you more about the others elsewhere in this book. The President has the lead in this chapter.

  He stood in the middle of the living room, at ease and in high spirits, with no circle of people around him. The others flopped on chairs or leaned against doorways chatting. Frozen to my spot I turned around, forced to face the fact that I, like the President, was standing alone with no one else to talk to. Dynamite could not have dislodged me from my place, which I’m sure the President knew, so, graciously, he came to me.

  “Are you enjoying your summer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Looking at me with total concentration, as if I were the only person in the room, he asked:

  “Are you going to make the theatre a career?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I can’t do anything else.”

  Paul came over to us. “Frank, would you get the President a fresh drink? He’s having a Bloody Mary.” What, I wondered was that? The President handed me a drained glass with a celery stick standing alone among red-stained ice cubes. “The bar is down the hall,” said Paul.

  I walked toward it thinking, “How could they trust me with this glass? I could be a Mafia prince or a modern-day John Wilkes Booth with a pinky ring full of arsenic.” It was then that I saw the blank faces of the Secret Service guys stationed quietly behind doorways.

  When I handed the President back his drink he was deep in discussion with Paul, but he took it, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Good luck with your acting, Frank.” “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  There were gales of laughter in another part of the living room caused by something I wished I’d been there to hear Noel Coward utter. And laughter is what came to dominate the rest of the afternoon. Not just occasional or sporadic. Full-belly laughs coming so fast and furiously I thought the President was going to have a heart attack. Buds came in and quietly announced lunch. Excuse me—luncheon.r />
  We were seated at a rectangular table in a modest dining room facing the sea. The President in the center with Coward directly across from him. It was set with blue and white china on a blue and white tablecloth, three glasses to a setting: water, red wine, white wine, and at least six utensils divided on either side and across the top of our plates. At each place setting was a small bouquet of freshly cut flowers set in a tiny straw basket; and on each plate a large linen napkin folded in a way I had never before seen. All the visuals of that table, as I remember them, were completely new to me, as was the meal we were served. A cold soup, lobster salad, steamed vegetables, and some kind of thick white pudding.

  As the afternoon progressed our napkins would grow increasingly damp with tears of laughter as Noel Coward reached into his bottomless hamper of stories, jokes, one-liners, and character assassinations. And the sight of my President pounding on the table with one hand and holding the other out, palm up, to Coward, begging him to wait while he caught his breath, has never left my memory. To see the leader of the free world so hopelessly convulsed with laughter, wiping his eyes continuously, and to watch his wife genuinely delighted to see him so happy, made a profound impression on me. How glorious it must have been for him. Not a single subject of importance discussed all afternoon. No current affairs, political views, or social commentary. Add to that the fact that Coward’s stories became increasingly vulgar with the liberal use of the words cunt and prick, and the beautifully pronounced, in his trademark clipped staccato, cocksucker and motherfucker.

  We retired to a sunroom, directly off the dining room, for coffee and dessert. It was three steps down into a cozy and bright space, also facing the sea. There was a couch under a large window, directly across from which sat a baby grand piano and several small armchairs scattered about. The President flopped down on the couch, Adele next to him. Bunny and Paul took an armchair each and Liza curled up on the floor at her mother’s feet. Jackie and I ended up sitting on the steps, shoulder to shoulder. “Isn’t this fun?” she whispered as Sir Noel took his place at the piano. It was then she explained to me the purpose of the afternoon. Coward was in Boston trying out a new musical entitled Sail Away, and Jackie asked Bunny if she could, through Adele, invite Mr. Coward down to the Cape in order, as she put it, “to give Jack a good time.”

  Act 2 was a triumph for Coward as he tirelessly sang one signature song after another: “Mad About the Boy,” “If Love Were All,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and as the last note of each song left his lips, Jackie would request another and another, and sing every lyric along with him. At one point we all sang “I’ll See You Again.” Like all the others, she knew it by heart, and following her lead, the President sang along just a beat behind.

  “Okay now,” said Adele in a loud forthright voice, “let’s get this show on the road. Come on, Jack.” She grabbed the President with one hand, swept the magazines off the coffee table in front of them with the other, and said, “Noelie, give us ‘A Room with a View.’ Hit it.” He did, and for the next ten minutes I watched the President in his yellow pants, just two feet away from me, attempting to follow Adele Astaire in a soft-shoe dance that had the rest of us singing to the music and Jackie up and snapping away. His face was blissfully silly as he feigned a nightclub entertainer and tried to mirror Adele’s moves: hands out in front of him, feet shifting in small kicks, body turning in circles one way and then the other, and slapping his hands and thighs in the tried-and-true vaudeville style.

  Two choruses and Sir Noel brought the song to a resounding finish. By now we were all up on our feet applauding wildly and the President stepped from the coffee table, took a bow, reached for Adele, and she joined him on the floor, each of them bowing with mock humility as the piano played them out of the room. I turned to Jackie, who was beaming with happiness, and said my first words to her since “hello.”

  “Not bad for a President.”

  “Not bad for Jack,” she said.

  We all trouped out to the lawn to say our good-byes, and before boarding the helicopter the President said to me:

  “What do you think, Frank? Should I keep my day job?”

  And then he was gone.

  I left later in the afternoon, having sneaked back into the dining room to steal the small bouquet that had been in front of the President’s plate. And that night I replayed every moment of the day in my mind. Coward had ended a medley from his new show with a haunting ballad entitled “Something Very Strange.” And as I sit here writing this on December 12, 2010, looking at snow-covered grounds from a window in the countryside forty-eight years later, Sir Noel’s lyrics seem sweetly prophetic.

  This is not a day like any other day!

  This is something special and apart!

  Something to remember

  When the coldness of December chills my heart.

  Nobody is melancholy. Nobody is sad.

  Not a single shadow on the sea.

  Something very strange is happening to me.

  All but two of us from that day are gone now: Jack, Jackie, Noel, Paul, Adele, Buds, and Liza. Other than myself, the sole survivor is Bunny Mellon, who in 2012 will turn 102, and has remained my lifelong friend. The President, had he lived, would be ninety-three years old. I kept the flowers I had taken from his place sitting in a tin cup in my room for the rest of the summer, until they withered and died. Of the forty-six years Jack Kennedy spent on this earth, I was privileged to have been in his company for four hours when he and those flowers were still in bloom.

  It was a day not like any other day. Nobody was melancholy. Nobody was sad. And there was not a single shadow on the sea.

  MONTGOMERY CLIFT

  He never spoke a word to me. Never even knew my name.

  It was 1962. I had moved into a four-flight walk-up on Third Avenue and 61st Street. One night there he was again. I don’t remember when or how often it would happen, but coming home late at night, I would find him rolled up in a ball in my covered vestibule, against the front door of the building. The first time I found him I thought he was just a street bum, of which there were very few in the 1960s. But when I focused in on his haggard and broken face, I saw the beautiful, profoundly gifted young actor he had been. Along with Marlon Brando and James Dean—two other men who also had talent, looks, sex appeal, and mystery—Montgomery Clift possessed an inner flame impossible to extinguish with age or death. All three exuded an androgynous quality that made them appealing to both sexes. Dean and Brando allegedly played with boys secretly, but Clift was openly gay in a time when it was forbidden.

  I knew he lived around the corner in a townhouse. I’d seen him often climbing or sitting on the steps. On a few occasions I picked him up in my hallway walked him there, and deposited him with his houseman, who took him from me with a silent thank you.

  His indelible performances in A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity, Judgment at Nuremberg, and The Misfits all reveal what must have been an agonized soul. And if there is any consolation to be found in his early death at forty-six, it is in watching him harness that agony and use it both creatively and thrillingly.

  As if by a tiny little creature in a film about aliens that crawls into your ear and occupies your brain, he must have himself been invaded, most likely at a time when he had no way of defending himself. And the invader must have brought with it a torment so great that it caused this lovely actor to curl up in an abandoned hallway, not his own, rather than turn a corner and suffer in his empty house.

  On this particular night, he was not even semi-conscious. My girlfriend opened our front door, gave me back the outside key, and went upstairs. I bent over, sat him up, put my hand under his knees, and lifted him into my arms with the ease I would have a five-year-old child. His head fell against my chest and I began the familiar walk toward his front door.

  He made no sound, did not open his eyes, and remained inert when I handed
him over to his keeper. On my way home I cried not from pity or sadness, but from fear. Could such a fate happen to me? And, I wondered, where had he been, what was the terrible pain, and why had he no one to hold him through the night? You wonder those things at twenty-four. When I got upstairs my girlfriend took me into her arms and we made love. Young, romantic love.

  Fifty years later, I no longer wonder the things I did that night. I understand there is nothing particularly romantic about a broken man lost and alone. But there is something profoundly noble in Mr. Clift’s efforts to hold his pain close and leave us with just the memories of his artistry.

  BILLIE BURKE

  Billie Burke spent the last part of her career paying off the debts of her late husband, the great showman Florenz Ziegfeld, deserving the moniker of her greatest role: Glinda the Good Witch in the classic film The Wizard of Oz.

  In the summer of 1956, she was touring in a lightweight comedy entitled The Solid Gold Cadillac, in which she played a woman who outsmarts the corporate guys and ends up with the money. Some of the touring plays had parts with one or two lines in them and these roles were played by the apprentices of the various theatres. When it got round to the Pocono Playhouse, where I was apprenticing, I was lucky enough to get not one but two bit parts. The first was that of a reporter holding a camera. I think I said something like “Look this way please” after first picking up Miss Burke and sitting her on a desktop. The second part was a groundbreaker for me.

  If you were among the chosen few to get a small role in one of the touring productions, it was necessary to have a quick rehearsal with that week’s star on the day of the opening night. They would have arrived the evening before or even early that morning from their last performance in some other northeastern state.