(This weekend, in Flagstaff, Arizona, men and women who were involved in the theater department of Northern Arizona University in the 1970s are gathering for a reunion that, unfortunately, won’t include me. Recently, through an exchange of e-mails attempting to nail down some dates of various productions, I was reminded of the summer of 1980, when some of us were fortunate enough to work with Oscar-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge in two productions, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. “Fortunate” is a tricky word here; Ms. McCambridge did not want to be there, apparently, and made things miserable for a lot of us. Still, I dug out some rose-colored glasses three years ago, when she died. Here’s to old friends, good times, and selective memory. From March 2004.)
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My grandmother cried when Elvis died, I remember. Just wept. My grandmother. Elvis.
It’s funny how we react, hearing the news that a famous person has passed on. Their lives get tangled up with our own, mixed in with memories. Our first date, our first vote, the first time we fell in love at the movies. We mark moments, we speculate on whether they really do die in threes as our mothers claim, we watch a retrospective and read an obituary, and we have stories.
I have a story.
It was announced last week that Mercedes McCambridge had died, at age 87. A celebrity to be sure, an Oscar-winning actress for “All The King’s Men,” and after a fading career she had perhaps her biggest fame as the voice of the Devil in “The Exorcist.” She had the voice for it, for sure.
A Life, then, as the Irish say. And oh, she was Irish.
She was also my friend, for a very short time, what seems like a very long time ago.
“I didn’t believe a word of it!” was the first thing she said to me. We were in rehearsal for Sam Shephard’s “Buried Child,” a play she despised. She wasn’t all that happy with my monologue at the moment, either.
I was playing her husband, hard enough when you’re 23 and your co-star is 40 years older, but then I imagine it was never easy being her husband.
She was loud and bossy, and I don’t think she particularly cared to be in the boonies of Northern Arizona, working with students, doing plays she didn’t like. But it was a job, and it was acting, and acting was what she knew. And she knew it, trust me.
Early on, she twisted her ankle on a cable backstage while we were doing “Blithe Spirit.” It didn’t seem to improve her mood, and she spent the rest of the summer in a wheelchair mostly, griping and snapping at anyone who got in her way. I hid a lot.
We hated her.
And then, one day in rehearsal, she needed a prop, a liquor bottle. One of the crew dashed off to the office of our technical director, a gin drinker, and found an empty in a trash can. It was filled with water and rushed to the stage, and Mercedes McCambridge poured and drank. And stopped.
She smiled then, a small smile and a strange sight for us, after all these weeks. She looked at the glass, and looked at us.
“My God,” she said. “I haven’t tasted gin in years.”
And she began to talk.
We knew, I suppose, something of her battles with alcoholism. It was part of her resume, her story, and there were long bouts and many hospitalizations, and finally AA and recovery. She talked of this, and also of Joan Crawford and Jack Kennedy, Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. Movies she’d made and places she’d been, and for an hour or so we sat at the feet of our enemy and listened.
She broke character that day, and we saw a life, and we learned something.
Her friends called her Mercy. I called her Ms. McCambridge, of course.
On opening night of “Buried Child,” we had a dialogue, she and I. Ms. McCambridge was offstage, reading from her script, while I sat alone on a couch. It was a difficult trick, lines and lines of one-word sentences and interjections, and at some point I flubbed. She covered, I covered, and we went on.
Afterward, she pulled me aside. “Young man, you were a pro out there,” she said, a pro being what she was and what she respected most of all.
She talked to me, then, from time to time, gave me suggestions and praised me occasionally. She encouraged a career, which never happened but then I was young and she was a famous person. I listened.
I never saw her after that summer, never crossed her path again, but I was glad for the experience and grateful that I’d survived. I’d never met a tougher woman, or a better actress, and I say that knowing it’s true and knowing it would be a compliment to her.
I followed what remained of her career, noted her biographies and caught her old movies when I could. I saw her on “Magnum, P.I.” one night, playing a washed-up actress, the villain, wheelchair bound until the end, when she leapt from the chair and tried to escape.
At the end of the show, Magnum explained. It seems she’d twisted an ankle during a production of “Blithe Spirit,” he said, and was in a wheelchair and just loved the attention it gave her.
I knew this already, of course, knew that she loved the spotlight and being theatrical and living up to her reputation. It was quite a reputation, all earned, and when I heard the news, heard that she’d died on March 2 but the announcement was made on St. Patrick’s Day, I knew who was responsible, and why.
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Excerpted from The World According to Chuck: Stories from Mukilteo of Family, Faith, Friends, Baseball and Sponge Puppets (Xlibris, October 2004).
Stuff
