Dropped Names by Frank Langella Page A

took a chance, stopped at her table, and told her my story as she politely stared up at me.
    â€œAnd now your screams are all gone. What happened?” She thought a moment and said:
    â€œOh yeah. I stopped! I was doing it fucking wrong for the last three months,” and returned to her salmon.
    I t was the last of several attempts I’d made to engage her. I am not thin-skinned, but it’s easier to deal with someone’s antipathy when you know the nature of the grievance. Although I do remember asking a young actress once why our director seemed to dislike me.
    â€œYou showed up,” she said.
    In Colleen’s case I had no clue and no mutual friend to intercede. So I accepted her animus and figured we’d never work together or know each other personally; sad, because she was a colossal actress and all her pals adored her.
    Colleen’s ex-husband George C. Scott was directing me in Design for Living at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre in 1984. During a note session in early previews, he said:
    â€œColleen’s coming tonight.”
    I told him my story. He seemed little interested.
    After the show, George came back and said:
    â€œHer agent says you’re an asshole.”
    Colleen was represented for many years by a theatrical agent whom, at the beginning of my career, I had unfairly fired. He had a legitimate grievance against me and had obviously poisoned Colleen’s mind.
    â€œWhat did you say, George?”
    â€œI said, ‘So what?’ ” He laughed.
    Obviously he said more than that because flowers arrived the next day and a break-a-leg telegram on opening night. Thereafter she was the warm and caring woman I’d often heard about and with whom I would be lucky enough to share a memorable evening.
    It was at an all-night gabfest in Houston not too long afterward when we’d both been asked to perform at a gala in honor of Arthur Miller. In my hotel suite Arthur, Colleen, Tony Lo Bianco, Mildred Dunnock, Robert Foxworth, Liz Montgomery, and I were gorging ourselves on hundreds of shrimp, roast beef sandwiches, french fries, mountains of dessert, and cheap champagne provided by the benefit committee.
    It was enough food for thirty people, but actors are insatiable when it comes to free food, and by 3 a.m. we’d eaten everything but the paper doilies on the restaurant trays and Colleen had drunk enough champagne to christen a fleet of battleships. We all smoked in those days, and gossiped viciously. Fewer smokers today, but vicious gossip is eternal.
    Colleen was our bitch leader. Dressed in bright red harem pants, tight at the ankles and billowing up to a flowing red top, she looked like a giant red pepper on stiletto heels. As the food disappeared into her mouth, hosed down by the champagne, she held forth on the dirt of the day. Hilarious vivisections of personalities and careers. I suspect the character of any actor who can’t fling this kind of mud from time to time and was certain I had most likely been so vivisected by her at one point, and might be again. Grateful as I was for a curtain having been dropped between us, I knew it could just as easily be raised once more.
    Arthur and his wife, Inge Morath, the photographer, left early. My wife went to bed and one by one people drifted away. It was now just Colleen, me, and her then boyfriend, Ken Marsolais, remaining. There was no more to eat, we’d systematically destroyed every reputation in the business, but she was still cooking. Ken wanted to go. She reluctantly got up, sucking on her cigarette, and staggered into the marble foyer of the suite toward the door, where she gleefully spotted a bowl of nuts on the hall table. She scooped up a huge amount, tossed back her head, flung them into her mouth, and in a second out they flew across the foyer and down the far wall onto the floor.
    â€œAgggg!” she screamed. “It’s potpourri !”
    We collapsed into the kind of