And it's memories that I'm stealing
Norman Lloyd has died. At a hundred and six, I can't say he didn't have the right to. He was the last living member of the Mercury Theatre.
His most famous part on film was his first: the title role in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), the guilt-ghost that Robert Cummings chases across America from a burning hangar in Glendale to the cold torch of the Statue of Liberty. He's almost a human MacGuffin. Where the top fifth columnist played by Otto Kruger gets a timelessly self-serving speech about winning sides, we never know what makes the man whose mail is addressed to "Frank Fry"—who knows, it could even be his real name—tick, whether he's an ideologue or an opportunist or just an indifferent, efficient purveyor of destruction, like one of the more malevolent iterations of Loki with his wiry face and red hair, so slight his suit almost seems to be wearing him. He is implied through a clever intercut of newsreel footage and a private smile to have been responsible for the fire that sank the SS Normandie. We know he's meant to be a creep as well as a fascist from the casually invasive once-over he gives Priscilla Lane on the ferry to Bedloe's Island, but he can't be vamped with the police on his heels; even with a gun in his hand, even chased up the echoing bronze and steel of the statue's arm, he's that silhouette of violence cast meta on the screen of Radio City Music Hall until he goes over the torch's rail and suddenly he's terrified and real, a very young man with nothing but a fraying sleeve between his life and a long, long fall. Hitchcock said afterward that he'd put the wrong man in peril and corrected his error with North by Northwest (1959), but it's echt Hitchcock to jerk the audience into sympathy with a pro-Nazi saboteur through nothing more than helplessness, the hero's hand reaching desperately down. For better or worse, he should have remembered, shadows can't be caught.
His most famous part on stage was Cinna the Poet for the Mercury Theatre's 1937 Caesar, a frail, funny, fatal case of mistaken identity who really believes until it's far too late that he can convince a fascist mob of his innocence by producing his papers, which are his poems. Lloyd in his memoir Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television (1992), which I discovered and gave to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch just this past Hanukkah, describes him as "a little clerk" with his pockets full of poetry, like a cross between Herbert Hoover and Maxwell Bodenheim, "a gentle, diffident man with a great deal of pantomimic comedy; the terror came out of comedy . . . As the gang surrounded me, I disappeared from the view of the audience save for one raised hand, with one last scream, 'The Poet!' The mob rushed me down the ramp at the back of the set out of sight of the audience, as if I were being devoured by an animal. The scene stopped the show." It inspired a painting. With a mix of the radio and stage companies of the Mercury Theatre, Lloyd went to Hollywood with Welles to make Heart of Darkness for RKO and then, fretting about the stall between productions and a financially uncertain future, did not stay to make Citizen Kane (1941). "I have always regretted it." He was born Norman Perlmutter. I imagine him as Bernstein.
His most famous part on TV was, as far as I can tell, Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere (1982–88), which I have never seen. Behind the camera, he directed prolifically; before I saw him anywhere as an actor, I almost certainly saw some of his episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65) because he did famous ones like Roald Dahl's "Man from the South" (1960) or Ray Bradbury's "The Jar" (1964). I may rewatch them in his honor, or one of his films I haven't seen yet. The blacklist kept him off the big screen for more than twenty years.
He was not an actor I followed in the sense of going looking, but I was glad to see him wherever he turned up, which lately was in noir; I was happy whenever I read he was still alive and now he isn't, in the way that no one should regret and yet. He took a great deal of time with him. He wasn't landscape for me, but I will still notice his absence, as if a tree or a Carnegie library had come down. He was beautiful when he was younger and I never saw him in a role that used it. He played tennis. He acted past his centenary. He fell off the Statue of Liberty.
His most famous part on film was his first: the title role in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), the guilt-ghost that Robert Cummings chases across America from a burning hangar in Glendale to the cold torch of the Statue of Liberty. He's almost a human MacGuffin. Where the top fifth columnist played by Otto Kruger gets a timelessly self-serving speech about winning sides, we never know what makes the man whose mail is addressed to "Frank Fry"—who knows, it could even be his real name—tick, whether he's an ideologue or an opportunist or just an indifferent, efficient purveyor of destruction, like one of the more malevolent iterations of Loki with his wiry face and red hair, so slight his suit almost seems to be wearing him. He is implied through a clever intercut of newsreel footage and a private smile to have been responsible for the fire that sank the SS Normandie. We know he's meant to be a creep as well as a fascist from the casually invasive once-over he gives Priscilla Lane on the ferry to Bedloe's Island, but he can't be vamped with the police on his heels; even with a gun in his hand, even chased up the echoing bronze and steel of the statue's arm, he's that silhouette of violence cast meta on the screen of Radio City Music Hall until he goes over the torch's rail and suddenly he's terrified and real, a very young man with nothing but a fraying sleeve between his life and a long, long fall. Hitchcock said afterward that he'd put the wrong man in peril and corrected his error with North by Northwest (1959), but it's echt Hitchcock to jerk the audience into sympathy with a pro-Nazi saboteur through nothing more than helplessness, the hero's hand reaching desperately down. For better or worse, he should have remembered, shadows can't be caught.
His most famous part on stage was Cinna the Poet for the Mercury Theatre's 1937 Caesar, a frail, funny, fatal case of mistaken identity who really believes until it's far too late that he can convince a fascist mob of his innocence by producing his papers, which are his poems. Lloyd in his memoir Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television (1992), which I discovered and gave to
spatch just this past Hanukkah, describes him as "a little clerk" with his pockets full of poetry, like a cross between Herbert Hoover and Maxwell Bodenheim, "a gentle, diffident man with a great deal of pantomimic comedy; the terror came out of comedy . . . As the gang surrounded me, I disappeared from the view of the audience save for one raised hand, with one last scream, 'The Poet!' The mob rushed me down the ramp at the back of the set out of sight of the audience, as if I were being devoured by an animal. The scene stopped the show." It inspired a painting. With a mix of the radio and stage companies of the Mercury Theatre, Lloyd went to Hollywood with Welles to make Heart of Darkness for RKO and then, fretting about the stall between productions and a financially uncertain future, did not stay to make Citizen Kane (1941). "I have always regretted it." He was born Norman Perlmutter. I imagine him as Bernstein.His most famous part on TV was, as far as I can tell, Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere (1982–88), which I have never seen. Behind the camera, he directed prolifically; before I saw him anywhere as an actor, I almost certainly saw some of his episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65) because he did famous ones like Roald Dahl's "Man from the South" (1960) or Ray Bradbury's "The Jar" (1964). I may rewatch them in his honor, or one of his films I haven't seen yet. The blacklist kept him off the big screen for more than twenty years.
He was not an actor I followed in the sense of going looking, but I was glad to see him wherever he turned up, which lately was in noir; I was happy whenever I read he was still alive and now he isn't, in the way that no one should regret and yet. He took a great deal of time with him. He wasn't landscape for me, but I will still notice his absence, as if a tree or a Carnegie library had come down. He was beautiful when he was younger and I never saw him in a role that used it. He played tennis. He acted past his centenary. He fell off the Statue of Liberty.
no subject
You are very welcome for both.
"They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate."
There's a variation on that in the interview I linked: "Orson had from either side of the stage this crowd moving like a scissors in on this solo figure. And he thinks it's because of his popularity as a poet." I suspect this was a story Lloyd told often, and I love that it gives such a good picture of the scene, since all that seems to survive otherwise is the one photograph. "Poet laureate" is really poignant, though. A street poet delighted to find himself with so many admirers until they tear him apart.
"He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too."
That's nice. The memoir includes details of the scene's choreography ("As I made a large semi-circle up and around to stage right, I became aware they were closing in on me, and I returned to the center where the poems had been thrown, increasingly apprehensive that the outcome could be terrible") but not the lighting, which sounds extremely effective.
They tried to recreate it for the film Me and Orson Welles, which revolves round this Julius Caesar production, but I don't believe the impact came across.
I am intrigued that someone tried to restage the scene at all, but it would take a hell of a cast and a director to pull it off.
(For the record, I just read your reviews of both the book and the film and your objection to the insertion of a fictional character in place of a real person makes perfect sense to me; it's the reason that even though I imprinted on Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986) in high school, I loved one aspect of it a lot less as soon as I learned anything about Joan Clarke. There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history. Green pines unrequitedly for Turing, approaches him romantically and is gently rebuffed as if she doesn't understand what his sexuality means for their relationship, disappears from mathematics into domesticity as soon as the war is done. Clarke was actually engaged to Turing over the summer of 1941. He had done the proposing: they were fast friends who had bonded over cryptanalysis, chess, and natural history, went to the cinema and took long bicycle rides together, could talk about everything from mathematics to knitting. He famously told her of his "homosexual tendencies" the day after his proposal and while it made her wary of their chances as a couple, she was neither upset nor entirely surprised by the information. As far as I can tell, they both seem to have hoped their mutual liking would be enough to make an exception to his orientation. He wanted some aspects of a married life very much; he wanted children (and did not expect Clarke to leave her war work to bear them) and he wanted to share his life with someone with whom he could always think and talk. And at the end of the summer, as it became clear to him that his admiration of her brilliance and affection for her as a person was not suddenly going to convert into sexual desire for her as a woman, he decided that it would not be fair to her to go through with the marriage and broke the engagement off. I have always thought that admirable. They stayed friends for the rest of his life. She did marry after the war: a retired army officer whom she met at GCHQ, having stayed in the field of cryptanalysis until her retirement in the late '70's freed her up to do some very well-regarded work in early modern numismatics. I understand the value of Pat Green as a dramatic device: another outsider who's a critical resource in times of national crisis and then dismissed with the return to "normal," her post-war compliance a cautionary tale against which the hero's nonconformity stands out all the more. I just find Clarke so much more interesting and especially in the wake of The Imitation Game (2014), I fear few people will know how much more so than her fictional counterparts or substitutes. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)
You're right, he'd have made an excellent Bernstein, too. And I really must watch Saboteur, I haven't yet.
no subject
From what you've told me, she definitely sounds far more compelling. Speaking of dramatic devices and reality being more complex and interesting, your example also reminds me of how, having learned through thuis article about E.M. Forster living in a menage a trois with a policeman and his wife for decades, where Forster and the wife, May, despite initial difficulties not only learned to share the man they both loved but formed their own bond, I later read the novel the author of the article wrote, My Policeman, and being extremely puzzled that the novel chose to go another way entirely, as in the novel, the wife reports the writer once she figures out he's in love with her husband to the police (in a way that doesn't incriminate her husband), and is punished with decades of a loveless marriage in name only. Why, thought I, if the real life precedent that attracted the novelist's attention was both more interesting and happier (despite difficulties) for all parties concerned?
There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history.
This, as the kids say these days. Like you, I can see the dramatic device points of Me and Orson Welles putting a fictional character in place of a real one: evidently the author wanted to tell a coming-of-age-story including sex, love, rivalry and heartbreak, and that wasn't doable with 14 years old Arthur Anderson (who got along fine with Welles), and presto, fictional 17 years old Richard Samuel happens. But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)
no subject
Seriously! Appreciative as it is, I side-eye the line "Who else but Forster could end up becoming firm friends with his lover's wife, and godparent to her child?" because quite a lot of people made poly arrangements work long before the word existed, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read a novel about yet some more people who were happy.
(I only learned a few years ago that Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson had an open marriage that had much less to do with his bisexuality than with their individual feelings about monogamy. Alan Strachan quotes her in Secret Dreams (2004): "A person may only ever love one man or woman in the world; that is fortunate. But it is an extraordinary rule that once married no man or woman should ever have some of the love that men and women have in them to give. For a man never to experience any other woman or for a woman never to experience love with another man can be a kind of imprisonment." They both had multiple, sometimes long-term partners over the course of their marriage. One of Michael's most serious boyfriends effectively co-parented with them; the Redgrave children loved him. I was delighted to learn these facts. It wasn't always easy, because even two-person relationships aren't, but it was real and it worked for them.)
But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)
I thought Pat Green was completely invented the first time I saw Breaking the Code, although I wasn't sure then why Dilly Knox, Sara Turing, and Christopher Morcom were represented with their real names while Arnold Murray appeared in the fictionalized form of Ron Miller. (I'm guessing now it's because Murray, like Clarke, was still alive at the time of the play's writing and production.) As an invention, she works fine! As a version of a real person, this entire conversation. I know less about Murray beyond what I have read in Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), but since Hodges writes firmly that he was traumatized by his part in Turing's conviction and suicide—he was blamed for them on the street in Manchester—I know he was more than a sexy bit of rough. What fiction does to people is so weird.