A Hell of a Life

This has been a lousy couple of weeks for lovers of the dramatic form. First Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Now Maureen Stapleton. With each of these losses another precious, ineluctable link in the chain of craft is broken.

Knotts' death filled me with sadness, McGavin's with fury. In attempting to anatomize my anger over McGavin I came to the conclusion that it was based on a long-held belief that this splendid actor never received his due. Yes, The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler and their deliciously hokey yet often wittily effective progeny Kolchak: The Night Stalker are cult favorites and will likely live on forever as have such limited engagements as The Prisoner, which stars another fine actor who never became the star he should have been.

What ties McGavin, McGoohan and, until recently my primary example of the problem, Brian Keith together is that each of them had precisely the gifts an actor needs to succeed: looks, idiosyncratic talent, and superbly individualistic speaking voices. Was it, perhaps, type-casting that kept them from the big brass ring? Idiot producers who wouldn't know genius if they were standing next to Marlon Brando? The simple, bad luck of the draw? Whatever it was that dogged them, each of these men was infintely deserving of a greater market share, as they say in the TeeVee Biz.

Knotts was, simply, beloved. No one who was a child in the 1960s, as I was, could fail to recall, with a frisson akin to sexual ecstasy, those immortal words "Nip it! Nip it in. The. Bud!" What forever cemented my admiration for Don Knotts was my first view (in, I'd estimate, 1969) of his pop-eyed, Barney Fife-squared performance in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which I adored to such a degree I remember extolling it during Show and Tell the following Monday, complete with bug-eyed "takes." Seeing it again (and again, and again) as I've gotten older has only endeared it, and Knotts' performance, to me all the more. Here is timing, inflection, a rare understanding of the wire-thin distinction between dignity, buffoonery and the ego-driven need for recognition Knotts honed in the Fife years. Along with something else: a gift for pathos that never tumbles into the abyss of special pleading. What a man.

Stapleton is another special case. With her face she could have been one of two things: a cafeteria cashier or a character actor. K&W's loss was our gain.

She won, incredibly, a Tony as "Best Supporting Actress" for her performance in the lead of The Rose Tattoo, a comic drama written expressly for her by Tennessee Williams. There's something in that ironic discrepancy perhaps only Stapleton herself could have enjoyed. She lived big, drank bigger. Her death at 81 is a bit of a shock; how the hell did her liver hold up so long?

Another irony she probably laughed over in that low, infectious chuckle of hers: no Irish actor I can think of played so many Jewish women, on stage and screen. (With time out for Hispanics like Inez Guerrero in Airport.) She also had the queasy distinction of being considered old long before she reached middle age: at 38, she's Dick Van Dyke's intractable nudze of a mother in Bye Bye Birdie. She got accidentally knifed in the face while filming The Fan, which must have felt like surviving Mt. Saint Helen's only to go down in flames falling asleep with a lit cigarette. She survived Woody Allen and playing his conception of The Vulgar Life Force in Interiors. Walter Matthau insisted she play, as she did on stage, all three women's roles opposite him in the movie of Plaza Suite; she ended up getting only one, and Matthau looked like a vain popinjay. But this was always the way of things. She had the lead in Orpheus Descending in New York and got a small supporting role in the strange movie version The Fugitive Kind. And here's one to whet your appetite: a listing on the Internet Movie Database for a Kraft Theatre television adaptation of All the King's Men with Stapleton as Sadie Burke. Oh my dear loving god, what I'd give to see that!

My favorite Stapleton performance came in Reds, Warren Beatty's glorious, histrionic, liberating, inane, insane, exhilarating ode to leftist idealism. (How the bloody hell did he get it made?) As Emma Goldman, Stapleton is the still, sane, reasonable figure of uncompromised integrity around which everyone else swirls, eddy-like and egocentric. It's a performance to treasure, especially when Stapleton throws away a line like her response to Beatty's suggestion that he walk her home after a late-night confab: "Why? I won't hurt anybody." To E.G., as she's called in the movie, is also given what is probably the epic's single finest critique of American politics: "I think voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain." It's a line Gore Vidal would be pleased to claim, and Stapleton tosses it off, not as a deadly bon-mot she's been dying to deliver, but as a simple statement of fact, not to be disputed.

Reds meant the world to me in 1981. It holds up less well now, but two essential elements remain undimmed: Jack Nicholson's impossibly sexy Eugene O'Neill, and Maureen Stapleton.

So, shall we have a glass in her honor? She would have.