Dropped Names by Frank Langella

’60s, and ’70s with long, flattering tributes in her column “Broadway Ballyhoo” in the Hollywood Reporter . Several times a year, Radie, who had a bum leg, walked with a cane, and wore a brace, entertained them all in her suite at the Savoy. She would plant herself in a comfortable chair, unlock the brace, lean the cane next to her, and hold court. The story goes that Coral walked in to find Radie surrounded by the likes of John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Oliver, and a bevy of simpering sycophants. She observed the scene and declared in a loud full voice, “There she sits, with all of London at her foot. ”
    But my personal favorite, and the most famous, was about a phone call she once made to a director early in the morning on the first day’s rehearsal of a Shakespeare play.
    â€œI’m very upset.”
    â€œWhat is it Coral dear?”
    â€œYou haven’t asked Phillip to be in our play.”
    Phillip was Coral’s husband at the time.
    â€œBut Coral, darling. We’re all cast. There’s no part for him.”
    â€œOh, yes, there is. Get the script. Turn to page sixty-four. You see halfway down, there where it says:
    â€œ ‘A Camp—near Dover.’ ”
    So casual was the wit, and so delightful the delivery, it often flew by in a flash. As we were departing the Garrick Club one evening a very short man came up behind us and tapped her on the shoulder. “Coral, darling,” he said, “you haven’t looked at me all evening.”
    She peered over her shoulder, gazed down and said, “You think I’ve got eyes in my ass?”
    C oral and Vincent, whom I only had the pleasure of briefly meeting once, were, I’m told, irrepressible together. Courageous realists who during their later years, had found a beautiful rapport and friendship. Vincent was by her side all through her illness and at her death at the age of seventy-seven.
    When she was close to the end, Alan Bates told me he called to speak to her and Vincent said:
    â€œI’m so sorry. She can’t come to the phone. She’s just gone to confession. And she’s going to be a very long time.”

COLLEEN DEWHURST
    W hen actors don’t like each other, it is usually with a vengeance, and Colleen Dewhurst did not like me.
    As I was coming out of a colleague’s dressing room backstage, Miss Dewhurst was coming in and fixed me with a stare little short of contempt. She sailed past without a word and I asked my companion if I had imagined her coolness.
    â€œOh no,” she said, “pure hatred.”
    What, I wondered, could I have done?
    C olleen was popular with other actors and they generally grouped around her at theatrical gatherings. One year she was seated backstage watching a Tony Awards ceremony on closed-circuit TV with lots of people I knew. I walked over and sat down next to her. But she stiffened, said not a word to me, and eventually moved away.
    I tried again one evening in 1982. I was playing Salieri in Amadeus at the Broadhurst and Colleen was playing in The Queen and the Rebels next door at the Plymouth. The walls of our stages backed up to each other.
    During the second act of Amadeus , Salieri has a long, quiet monologue—pin-drop time—and every night at precisely the moment it began, I would hear Colleen let out a blood-curdling scream next door and storm through some dialogue. No matter how I timed my monologue, her screams always hit at exactly the quiet moments for me.
    One night it stopped.
    â€œDid Miss Dewhurst’s show close?” I asked the stage manager.
    â€œNo.”
    At that time, there was a restaurant on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street called Downey’s. On matinee days you could find Colleen, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Jason Robards mostly sitting by themselves in one of the round red booths, reading and eating before heading back to their dressing rooms for a nap.
    So I