Читать книгу Great Second Acts - Marlene Wagman-Geller - Страница 14
ОглавлениеMay-December relationships have been the fodder of the silver screen; traditionally, the former have been young women, the latter, older men. This paradigm changed with the rise of what has become known in popular parlance as the “cougar.” In the movie The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson was Benjamin Braddock’s graduation present; in American Pie, Stifler’s mom proclaimed, “I like my scotch and men the same way—aged eighteen years”; in Sex and the City, Samantha Jones’s boy-toy lured her down the path of monogamy. But an octogenarian was the leader of this pack of Mrs. Robinsons.
The woman who became renowned as a “cradle-robber” was Ruth Gordon Jones from Quincy, Massachusetts. Her father, Clinton, was a retired sea captain, and her mother, Annie, bartered sewing skills for her daughter’s piano lessons. Ruth met her destiny at age sixteen in the upper balcony of the Colonial Theater in Boston, at a production of The Pink Lady. After the performance, Ruth heard voices telling her, “Go on stage!” Never one to loathe a good suggestion, she took the ethereal message to heart, and broke the news to her father that she was leaving for the Never-Never Land of Broadway. His less-than-enthusiastic response was, “What makes you think you’ve got the stuff?” Although the comment was harsh, the New Englander felt he was being pragmatic: his five-foot-tall daughter with bow legs was not the stuff that made for a screen siren. He advised her to become a physical education teacher, but, as Ruth said, “I wanted to do something a little more sexy than that.” Armed with equal parts grit and wit, the eighteen-year-old left for New York. Clinton gave her the money for one year’s tuition to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, fifty dollars spending money, and his old spyglass from his sailor days. According to Ruth, “He told me I could hock it if I needed money. He said if you’re going to be an actress, you’ll be in and out of hock shops all your life. Well, I hocked plenty of things, but never that spyglass.” She loved the city and considered herself a New Yorker forever after. Although Ruth loved the city, it took time for her love to be returned. Her teachers informed her that she “showed no promise” and showed her the door. The teen refused to heed the naysayers, saying, “The will to succeed, that is half the battle. I hadn’t any illusions about my ability; I only thought if other people could learn to act, I could.” She wrote to her parents, “I would rather be an actress than live. In other words, if I could not be an actress I would gladly take my life. I can say that without fear because I can be an actress and will be.” Despite getting the boot from her school, Ruth landed the role of one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan; Alexander Woollcott wrote a review in the New York Times in which he denounced the supporting cast, with one exception: “Ruth Gordon was ever so gay as Nibs.” Her joy was short-lived, as her mother died during the show’s first week; after a brief return to Quincy, she was back at work. As a dancer in her next role, she earned $1.25 and two ham sandwiches a day. In Seventeen, she received a withering review when Heywood Broun wrote in the New York Tribune, “Anyone who looks like that and acts like that must get off the stage.” She did not. A year later, she married the star of that production, Gregory Kelly. After a brief hospital stay, in which she had both her bowlegs broken and straightened (she felt it the price to pay for an aspiring star), the Kellys started a repertory company in Indianapolis. Gordon drew acclaim for a performance in Saturday’s Children, a 1927 play costarring Humphrey Bogart. During the run, her husband’s congenital heart condition worsened, and for the second time, Ruth played one drama on stage while agonizing through another offstage. She left a second-act curtain call to rush to Gregory and was with him when he died. As a widow, Ruth became romantically involved with producer Jed Harris; their romance was clandestine, as he was married. Her role as the other woman produced son Jones Harris, born in Paris. His birth was a loosely kept secret, and they stayed in Europe for several months. As social stigma against illegitimacy lessened, Jones’s life became more open, and he grew up with birthday parties at Sardi’s and summers in the Catskills, where his mother toured. He eventually married a Vanderbilt.
Romantic tranquility finally arrived when Ruth married writer-director Garson Kanin in 1942; they had met briefly twice before, but the third time “was a go.” Initially, she was apprehensive about their relationship because he was sixteen years her junior, but their marriage proved a triumph. The couple divided their time between a Central Park South apartment and a studio in Carnegie Hall. They were together till death did them part, and during their forty-three years of marriage, they wrote the screenplays Pat and Mike and Adam’s Rib, both of which became classics for costars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. As she approached her eightieth birthday, she told an interviewer, “Thank heaven for Garson! I wouldn’t have come this far if I weren’t married to the most wonderful man in the world.”
Ruth’s theatrical ability and trademark wit bought her entry to the Algonquin Round Table, where she lunched with fellow humorist Dorothy Parker and dined at the White House with the Franklin D. Roosevelts. Gordon also achieved acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic when she starred in The Country Wife, bringing the Old Vic crowd to its feet. The British critics had not believed an American could pull off such a performance, and a breathless cable from a New York Times correspondent read, “Last night, Ruth Gordon took London by storm!”
A film career blossomed throughout the 1940s and into the ‘50s. She joined Hollywood’s inner circle, working and socializing with Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, George Cukor, Jack Warner, and Lillian Gish. Unlike other actresses, who decided to fade away when their beauty diminished, Ruth pooh-poohed that notion. She had struggled too hard to watch her career disappear in the rearview mirror. The actress turned author when she wrote her autography; in its pages, Ruth relayed the fascinating story of how a young woman with no physical or material advantages clawed her way through the theatrical jungle of stage and screen. In Myself Among Others—the others are the numerous celebrities in whose orbit she travelled, such as Harpo Marx, Ethel Barrymore, Irving Berlin—she devoted several passages to reflections on aging. Ruth observed, “On my seventy-fourth birthday I dreaded looking in the glass. I didn’t want any surprises, but I got one. At seventy-four, I look better than seventy-three. If you make it through seventy-four years, can it be that things shape up?” While Hollywood lore held to the paradigm that a woman can be one of two things, young or dead, Ruth did not buy into that mindset. She wrote, “Shakespeare died when he was fifty-two. If I had, I’d never have been in The Matchmaker or met Mia or been on The Joey Bishop Show or flown six times across the country or won an Oscar or eaten papaya or been robbed of all my jewelry or seen M*A*S*H* or Where’s Poppa? or Don Rickles.”
The ambitious girl from Quincy’s wildest dreams came true when Roman Polanski gave her the role of Mia Farrow’s devil-worshipping neighbor in Rosemary’s Baby, which garnered the seventy-two-year-old an Academy Award for best supporting actress. Two years later, in Where’s Poppa, she played the daffy mother who has Lucky Charms topped with Pepsi-Cola for breakfast. One of her most iconic roles was as the eighty-year-old funeral groupie who becomes the lover of a suicidal nineteen-year-old in Harold and Maude. While the movie’s far-fetched plot pivoted on the extremity of the May-December romance, its magic emanated from the couple’s mutual affection that did not allow age to impede it. Just as Harold was smitten with Maude, audiences were enamored with Ruth. No other film portrays an older woman with such dignity, as someone who is comfortable with her years, is sexually active, and is still a babe. The options for actresses of a certain age are largely roles that do not recognize their sexuality except as something that has faded—Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard—or as carnal predators—Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Libido does not wither at the onset of age spots. Harold and Maude, a movie that achieved cult status, bombed at the box office after its release. This fact is perhaps understandable, given the octogenarian leading lady and the fact that it came out the same year as Carnal Knowledge, starring sex kittens Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret. It took twelve years for Ruth’s film to finally make a profit. Gordon said that when her $50,000 check arrived in the mail in 1983, she almost threw it away, as she mistook it for a sweepstakes offer from Reader’s Digest.
Fifty-three years after the American Academy of Dramatic Arts dismissed Ruth from its ranks for showing no promise, the organization offered its mea culpa. She addressed its graduating class with the weight of many years of accumulated wisdom: “The last time I was at the Academy, the president said, ‘We feel you’re not suited to acting. Don’t come back.’ Well, you see who’s standing here. And on that awful day when someone says you’re not pretty, you’re no good, think of me and don’t give up!”
In tribute to its famous daughter, the town of Quincy held a Ruth Gordon Day and dedicated an amphitheater to her in 1984, shortly after her eighty-eighth birthday. At the ceremony, she said, “I am the first person in my family to have a theater named for her. It took a long time. I started toward this eighty-eight years, eleven days and five and a half hours ago. I never face the facts. I never listen to good advice. I’m a slow starter but I get there.” Ruth was vocal about her disdain for retirement. In 1977, the eighty-one-year-old Ms. Gordon testified before the House Select Committee on Aging and said, “It’s like slavery. First, you’re allowed to work. Then you’re not. As the great baseball player Satchel Paige once said, ‘How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?’”
At the conclusion of Myself Among Others, Gordon wrote of her life, “It’s been awful and great and hair-raising and beautiful and side-splitting and terrifying and unbelievably groovy, and I wouldn’t live over one single day of it, but will I ever hate to see that evening sun go down!” The seaman’s daughter who fearlessly navigated the rocky shores of acting passed away at her Martha’s Vineyard summer home with Garson at her side. He said even her last day was typically full, with walks, talks, errands, and a morning of work on a new play. She had made her last public appearance two weeks before, at a benefit showing of Harold and Maude, and had recently finished acting in four films. In one of them, not surprisingly, Ruth had insisted on doing her own motorcycle stunts. The obituaries claimed she was eighty-eight―a pointless statistic, as Gordon defied the constraints of age with a steely vengeance. Perhaps the best tribute can be from her own words. “I don’t want to boast but I walk through New York and policemen stop and yell, ‘We love you, Ruthie, we just love you…’” Out of the mouths of New York’s finest. At her death, friends referred to a light going out, and in a sense, an entire theatrical galaxy had been extinguished. As Ruth once said, “If you live long enough, you are your work and your work is you.” The memories of her stage performances, movies, screenplays, books, and most of all, her life as theater, live on.
