Rage and Glory: The Volatile Life and Career of George C. Scott

537 Pages·2008·6.66 MB·English

by  David Sheward

THE VOLATILE LIFE AND CAREER OF
DAVID SHEWARD
For Jerry, who gives me everything
Introduction
i Coal Miner's Son
2 Growing Up in a Hurry
3 The Dark Ages
4 New York Again
5 A "Bus Accident" with Colleen Dewhurst
6 A Third Marriage, The Hustler, and the Theatre Of Michigan
7 Dr. Strangelove and East Side/West Side
8 Enter Ava
9 Two Comedies and Petulia
Io New Marriage, Broadway Hits, and a Flop
II Patton
112 Refusing to March in the "Meat Parade"
13 Trish Takes Over
114 Swimming with Dolphins and Drinking with Russians
1[5 A Tame Savage
1[6 Papa, the Beast, and a Sly Fox
17 Patton Meets the Godfather
i8 "All I Get Is Junk"
z9 "The Most Mellow Son of a Bitch You've Ever Seen"
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Major Theatre, Film, and TV Credits
Appendix B: Awards and Nominations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
THE LIGHTS DIM TO CONCLUDE the evening's performance of Noel
Coward's frothy comedy Present Laughter at the Circle in the Square theatre on
Broadway. The audience is applauding as the lights come back up. The cast
enters to take their curtain calls. The applause swells as the star and director of
the show George C.Scott enters. Usually, an actor looks happy when he's
receiving the audience's love. But Scott's granite features are fixed in a scowl.
The rest of the company can tell he hasn't liked this audience. Maybe they
weren't smart enough. Maybe they didn't laugh in the right places. Maybe they
unwrapped too many of those little hard candies.
Whenever Scott didn't like an audience, he would refuse to give them a solo
curtain call. Instead he would have the entire cast bow with him. He would
signal his fellow players to get up from where they were sitting after taking their
own calls and joining him center stage, usually muttering under his breath, "I'm
not going to bow for these horses' asses."
Tonight Scott enters quickly, begins gesturing for the cast to get up, and
moves to his center stage position. The audience-this stupid audience thinks
Scott is directing them to rise and give him a standing ovation, which makes him
even madder. By the time the company is all in place, the entire audience is on
its feet and the star is furious. The cast takes a fast bow and Scott bounds off in a
huff.
At the moment of supreme adulation, the actor rejects his public. This defiant
gesture, imperceptible to the cheering crowd at the Circle in the Square, was
emblematic of Scott's love-hate relationship with his audience and his craft,
indeed with the entire world. He craved affection, but wanted it only at his own
price. He turned down an Oscar nomination for The Hustler and the award itself
for Patton only after he had experienced the crushing disappointment of losing
on his first nomination for 1959's Anatomy of a Murder.
He often threatened to quit acting, but never did. He thought it was a crazy
way to earn a living, but, as he expressed to a fellow performer after many
drinks, he didn't know how to do anything else. There were directing and
producing projects (some more successful than others) and a few attempts to
return to his college major of journalism (an article for Esquire on Vietnam, an
unfinished historical novel). But he always found himself back in front of the
camera or onstage.
He took risks on and offstage, twice investing his own money in vehicles for
himself and losing his shirt. "Safe actors hold back, experiment not, dare not,
change nothing and have no artistic courage," Scott told an interviewer. "I call
them walkers. I may stagger a little now and then, but I have never been accused
of walking."
He was never accused of being safe, either. He never wanted to repeat himself.
The gallery of George C.Scott portrayals is studded with villains, heroes,
criminals, con men, gamblers, and, most of all, rebels-the most famous of all
being General George S.Patton. The actor and subject shared more than a first
name. Patton bucked the military establishment as Scott chafed at the restraints
of the Hollywood hierarchy. The general was a brilliant strategist but lacked tact
and diplomatic skills. He said what he thought, consequences be damned. The
actor was an equally brilliant practitioner of his craft who spoke his opinions
regardless of their effect on his career.
William Goldman in his book The Season described Scott as being one of
only two actors whom he believed was actually capable of coming down off the
stage or screen and killing him. The other was Burt Lancaster, but Goldman
theorized that Lancaster would murder him with charm, whereas Scott would
just bludgeon him. With the possible exceptions of Robert Duvall, Robert De
Niro, and Al Pacino, there are no star-level actors today who could pass such a
killer-instinct test-and certainly none in the up-and-coming generation.
Scott carried an air of authority and power with him. The critic Harold
Clurman wrote of him, "He is always vivid, never less than arresting. He is one
of the few American actors who create the impression of a mature manliness:
most others strike me as grown-up boys."
His physique helped lend him this authority. At a towering height of six feet
two inches, he possessed a nose like a bald eagle's beak, craggy features, and a
muscular frame. His voice was equally distinctive, a guttural rasp that sounded
like rocks rattled inside a dented tin can.
He was a man's man in an age of men's men. As Scott was coming of age, the
ideal American male in fiction and film was the archetypical figure made famous
in the works of Ernest Hemingway: a macho drinker who was free with his fists
and stingy with his emotions. Appropriately, one of his subtlest performances is
in an adaptation of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream.
Like the protagonists of Hemingway, Scott could be a drunken brawler and a
binge drinker. By the time he was forty, his nose had been broken five times-four
times in fights and once in a mugging. But, as actress Dana Ivey observed, "He
was a deeply felt person and sensitive which he covered up with that rough
masculinity."
Married five times to four women, and distant with his six children, Scott was
as restless in his personal relationships as he was quixotic in his professional life.
The current wife didn't support him enough, the current job wasn't fulfilling
enough (even Patton missed somehow, according to him.
He would not even deal with death on any terms but his own. In 1994, he was
diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm, a swelling of the blood vessel which could
prove fatal. An operation would have prolonged his life, but as the problem
worsened he refused proper medical attention and eventually died of the
condition. He was George C. Scott, goddamn it, and no one was going to tell him
what to do.