Read Maggie Smith: A Biography Online
Authors: Michael Coveney
Maggie Smith: A Biography (22 page)
With Maggie seemingly lost to Robin Phillips in Stratford and the film moguls in Hollywood, offers of work in the London theatre had temporarily dried up. But when Tom Stoppard completed
Night and Day
, his 1978 West End comedy about freedom, journalism and politics, one of the first actresses considered for the role of Ruth Carson, bored wife of a mining engineer based in a fictitious African country, was Maggie Smith. It is something of a rough irony that Maggie’s agent, Peter Dunlop, was not impressed with the play and returned it to Stoppard’s agent without passing it on. Maggie certainly never read it until the opportunity arose to take the play to Broadway and she prepared for her third New York appearance on condition that she could perform the role in London first. This she did, in July 1979, taking over from Diana Rigg, who had scored a big personal success when the play opened in the previous November.
As things worked out,
Night and Day
only ran a couple of months in New York at the end of 1979, and Maggie was therefore free, having missed the 1979 festival, to return to Stratford for Robin Phillips’s last season; from there she fortuitously made a resounding London comeback as Virginia Woolf in a tailor-made vehicle by Edna O’Brien. As usual in Maggie’s career, everything fell into place without anything much having been planned. She was as strangely resigned as ever to her obsessional calling, her fate. Nothing much had changed in that respect, as she told the
New York Times
before opening on Broadway: ‘Acting is what I do. One is nervous, every single time, to go on a stage at all. But it’s the only way I’ve lived. I’ve never been in a position to question it. It is my work.’
The background to the action of
Night and Day
is a rebellion against a dictatorial president. The press corps covering the story includes the tough nut Dick Wagner, a boastful and competitive ‘fireman’ (‘I go to fires. I don’t file prose. I file facts’), and the idealistic young freelance Jacob Milne, who has scooped Wagner in his own paper and is threatening to scoop him again with a presidential interview. The journalists’ rivalry extends also to Ruth, in whose house the action is set. She has had an affair with Wagner in London, but Milne now strikes her as metal more attractive. Ruth herself has rather languid views on the ethical debate on journalism in the play (‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand’).
Peter Wood was once again her director, and he cites one day of rehearsal where Maggie gave her greatest performance. At the start of Act Two, Ruth comes from behind a tree after a rather strange, unsettling scene with the younger journalist. Ruth, naked (in the guise of her double), walks across the stage and into the house, and Maggie walks round the tree:
She had this ability to communicate that what we had just seen was a fantasy, but that was way down her list of priorities. What Maggie offered was a woman appalled by the force of her own sexual fantasy, unsteadied by it, so that when she came round the tree, she shook it away. Then she wondered if it had been real, and her hand came up to her face, and slowly she began to take a humorous attitude towards her own fantasising. This was simply the most dazzling display. She did it on that morning in rehearsal, then she lost it, got it back, lost it again, and by the time we got to New York she had laid her hands on it very precisely. It triggered an immensely complex audience reaction: a rapt silence, followed by this magnetic power, the slow realisation that they’d been hoodwinked by the dramatist … It was miraculous how Maggie handled the house and finally persuaded them into an extraordinary, rueful laughter.
That, says Wood categorically, and the scene she rehearsed with Olivier in the first act of
The Master Builder
, were the two greatest moments he has ever known in the theatre.
Maggie opened with Patrick Mower as Wagner and Edward de Souza as her husband, at the Phoenix. She made much more of Ruth’s inner turmoil, in contrast to the devastatingly cool, self-possessed and glacial version of Diana Rigg. As Michael Billington noted, Maggie’s Ruth was a nervy, vulnerable expatriate sending out periodic cries for help which were totally ignored. In this way Maggie got closer, one felt, to the tension Stoppard sought between the character’s pronouncements and, a subtle distinction, her speaking thoughts. Stoppard had evened up some of the arguments about the press and wrote in a topical gag which referred to the protracted strike at Times Newspapers in the struggle between the unions and the management leading up to the installation of new technology and the reduction of manning levels required by the new proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Ruth was asked if the papers were flown in and she replied, ‘I don’t think so; we’re still getting
The Times
.’
During this summer, Kenneth Tynan, despite suffering horribly from emphysema, was beginning work on a
New Yorker
profile of Maggie, although his friend and researcher, Ernie Eban, had been trying to persuade him to turn his attention instead to Bob Dylan. Tynan lunched Maggie twice in L’Étoile, his favourite London restaurant, during June. When he went along to see
Night and Day
, he scrawled on his programme a reference to Maggie’s long upper lip and ‘some of the finest fingers in the business’, noting that she distinguished (‘where Rigg didn’t’) between the private thoughts and normal dialogue of a play in which she entangled herself like a vine. Tynan’s profile never progressed beyond a few dozen small pages of spidery jottings; he died aged fifty-three in July 1980 in hospital in Santa Monica.
When
Night and Day
opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington in October 1979, the response was enthusiastic and the play sold out for six weeks. Joseph Maher, who was playing Maggie’s husband, Geoffrey Carson, was convinced that New York was going to be ‘colossal’. Tom Stoppard was elated by the performance and gave Maggie an enamel ‘head girl’ badge. He felt as blessed in her performance as he had been in Diana Rigg’s:
When it comes to humour, comedy on any level, Maggie perhaps has no rival. She can get more out of a phrase, sometimes a single word, than any playwright has a right to expect. She manages to inhabit a character totally while simultaneously standing outside the characterisation and making her own ironic commentary. This is an ‘impossible’ trick, like being in two places at once.
Dick Wagner was played by a perfectly competent actor, Frank Converse, but by the time the show reached New York he had been replaced by Paul Hecht. Maggie refused to comment on whether she had had Converse fired; Converse sued for the rest of his salary on his run-of-the-play contract. The producer Michael Codron reported to Maggie’s dressing room in Washington and she said, talking into the make-up mirror, ‘I’ll say this for you, Michael, you sure can pick ’em!’ Codron believes that he has never recovered from the Converse affair as far as Maggie is concerned.
Maggie’s name was above the title outside the ANTA, later renamed the Virginia, and since 2005 the August Wilson, on 52nd Street. (ANTA was an acronym for the American National Theatre Academy, original home of the Guild Theatre.) As Ted Kalem said in
Time
magazine, ‘playing the ANTA stage is like pitching a tent in the Sahara.’ Maggie did not like it, and she did not like her dressing room, either. She had it painted and recarpeted and continued moaning about it in an interview with Rex Reed in the
Daily News
. She complained that she had to wash her hair at home each day as the sink at the ANTA ‘didn’t work’. Reed recorded the exasperated reaction of the theatre owner:
That woman has made so many impossible demands that she’s becoming damned tiresome. Nothing seems to satisfy her. We re-carpeted, relighted, repainted, and re-shampooed the theatre and it’s still not enough. She even wanted the aisles changed. Helen Hayes, Kate Hepburn, Raymond Massey, Julie Harris – all occupied that same dressing room and never complained. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne even occupied it together, at the same time. No complaints about the sink.
Edward Albee’s
The Lady from Dubuque
had recently opened on Broadway, and the title amused Maggie. Each night, Joseph Maher was touched to find Maggie standing in the wings holding a jacket for his very quick change and ready to assist in a rapid adjustment of his cravat. The job should have been that of a very fat, camp dresser who was working on the show, and over dinner one night Maher commented on her unnecessary kindness. ‘Well,’ said Maggie airily, ‘we couldn’t have the lady from Dubuque doing it for you, could we?’ Another well-travelled anecdote attaches to one of the monologues, when Maggie had to say quietly to her confused self, ‘Run, run, you stupid bitch.’ She inserted the slightest of pauses after the first ‘run’ and, at one matinée, a deaf lady near the front loudly enquired of her neighbour, ‘What did she say?’ Maggie quickly continued, a little more forcefully, ‘Run, you stupid bitch,’ which the deaf lady took in quite the wrong way.
Maggie and Beverley were borrowing Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s house in Turtle Bay and often supped after the show in Gallagher’s Steak House opposite the ANTA, usually with Joseph Maher, who became a close friend. Like Alec McCowen, he had a good ear for the distinctive quirkiness of Maggie’s laser-like observations. One of the producers of
Night and Day
was the bustling, businesslike Nell Nugent, and Maher remembers Maggie whispering sotto voce as she heaved into view one night, ‘Oh dear, here comes Nell Nugent, mean as paint.’ That sink in the dressing room still rankled.
The reviewers complained of too much plot and not enough coherence. Much later, Maggie explained the play’s New York failure to Jack Tinker in terms that make very good sense: ‘They simply couldn’t comprehend why a woman would go out and have an affair just because she hadn’t sewn Cash’s tapes in her son’s clothes when he went back to school. It may be a very stupid reason to have an affair. But there isn’t a woman in England who wouldn’t understand.’ Katharine Hepburn, when she visited backstage in her flat shoes and raincoat, told Maggie and Maher, ‘The audience hates this play.’ There was no way round it. One night, Maggie took her customary solo call in front of the cast, and two people stood up in the front stalls and offered a weak ‘Bravo’. ‘Oh dear,’ Maggie muttered as she shuffled back into the line, ‘deep sarcasm!’
Within a few months of opening in New York,
Night and Day
closed. Maggie had received an Edna O’Brien script about Virginia Woolf, a writer she much admired and one who preyed on her subconscious. She had once told an interviewer that she wished she had a strong, large face like Virginia Woolf’s: ‘Mine is very, very small. Too small.’ The novelist had written the play,
Virginia
, with Eileen Atkins in mind, but Kenneth Tynan read it, suggested Maggie and made sure she received a copy of the script. Edna O’Brien did not know Maggie at this point, but she shared the same hairdresser, Patricia Millbourn, and the latter acted as another go-between. Robin Phillips liked the script and agreed that Maggie could do it at Stratford. It was to be a highlight of their last season together.
Things had gone slightly awry in Ontario. During rehearsals for
Private Lives
, Robin had been taken ill and Maggie was not planning to return for the 1979 season. In the event, he recovered, but this period was rife with speculation as to who would succeed him. Nonetheless, the 1980 season was a memorable last thrash. Maggie scored a sensational triumph as Virginia Woolf at the Avon, while she said farewell on the Festival stage with a second look at Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
, perhaps her final exorcism of the partner-ship with Robert Stephens, and as Arkadina in Chekhov’s
The Seagull
. Her favourite sparring partner, Brian Bedford, was Trigorin; her golden Orlando, Jack Wetherall, was Konstantin, and a trio of Stratford’s own biggest stars – William Hutt as Dorn, Roberta Maxwell as Nina and Pat Galloway as Masha – added more lustre.
Maggie’s Beatrice was a much more stately affair than the reading à la Zeffirelli at the Old Vic. She still punctuated the laughter on the line about her mother’s cry of childbirth but, on the video recording, ‘Kill Claudio’ elicits a huge laugh, albeit one mixed with shock and disbelief. Lavishly costumed by Robin Fraser Paye in the English Civil War period, Maggie and Bedford struck a handsome cavalier partnership that is most notable, perhaps, for its air of civility and relaxation. The edge and the bite have given way to an almost total luxuriance in the security of a comic partnership. Michael Billington thought they now sparked each other off like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. With Maggie’s maturity came a richer, more gravelly voice and the almost imperceptible shading of tears into laughter, of exquisite pathos, that characterised all her work with Robin Phillips.
She was exactly the right age for Arkadina – forty-three, going on thirty-two when her son’s not around to contradict her – and she played the comic-monster side of the character to the hilt. The silliness and volatility of Arkadina are apparent, but above all the impression you get is of an absolutely rampant stinginess. Just as she used elements of her mother’s Scottish Calvinism for Miss Brodie, one senses Maggie harking back, in a subconscious way, to Meg’s well-intentioned but ferocious penny-pinching in Ilford and Oxford. Twice she declares, very firmly, to Sorin and to Konstantin, that she has no money. Finally, she’s had enough and stuns the audience with one of the loudest and angriest explosions of her career: ‘I’m an actress, not a banker!’ This meanness underpins the mercurial vanity of all she says and is marked savagely on her departure, when she sweeps away from the servants with ‘Here’s a ruble; it’s for the three of you to share.’ But she kills incisively, too, on the simplest of phrases which are just slightly inflected to cause maximum damage. ‘The garden reeks of sulphur; is that intentional?’ she teasingly remarks, thus scuppering at a stroke her son’s serious artistic aspirations and his faith in her judgement. And when this Arkadina states that she’d rather be in a melodrama than perform the gibberish her son writes, you feel the full force of a blow delivered by an actress who really does identify with that remark and has always preferred to line up with the tried and tested as opposed to the difficult and risqué.