JOSEPH COTTEN: COURTLY COMPETENCE AT THE CORE

Courtliness is not a staple American commodity, even in those Eastern Seaboard fastnesses from Boston to Richmond where it might once have been said to flourish. But it has been just that rare prize of a handsome courtliness that has given Joseph Cotten his long and pleasing career.

Cotten was born and raised in Petersburg, Va., where his family has ancient ties, and the origins explain a good deal about his low-key charm.

His is a courtliness that has alternated with a nice ambiguity between heroism and smooth villainy, between quiet strength and fateful weakness.

The persisting core of Cotten’s work has been an elegant and unobtrusive craftsmanship which emphasized the role that Cotten was playing rather than the fact that Cotten was playing it. Not often has an important Hollywood personality of Cotten’s generation been so deferential to the material itself, from “Citizen Kane” to “Shadow of a Doubt,” “The Third Man,” “Portrait of Jennie” and beyond.

In a tradition more British than American, he has been the working actor: Have tux, will travel. He has done everything, from “Petulia” to “The Abominable Dr. Phibes,” occasionally lending his particular dignity to some very thin texts indeed.

Now at the age of 82, he has written “Joseph Cotten: An Autobiography,” with the tongue-in-cheek subtitle “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere” (Mercury House, San Francisco: $17.95, 272 pp.). It is written with what we can call predictable urbanity and amusement, and far more affection and gratitude than anger. In what is its major intention, I feel sure, it is a love poem to his wife, Patricia Medina, whom he married in 1960.

They now live in a bright and airy house, walled and gated, in Palm Springs. The Cottens are new to this house, but they have lived in Palm Springs for several years. He practices sculpture, weaving strips of heavy metal into graceful shapes with fanciful names like “The Soft Dollar” and “The Eccentric Pound.”

What Cotten does not ignore but does not stress--except to give courage to others--is that the physical fates have been unkind to him in recent years, and have set him a rugged test of character.

Ten years ago, an operation to remove some nodules from his vocal cords forced him to go without speaking for six weeks: a chore for anyone, a special agony for an actor who lives by his voice. He communicated with his wife by writing her notes, and she observed later that a listener at the door would have assumed that a crazy woman lived there alone, talking to herself all the while.

Cotten had recovered from the surgery when, in June, 1981, he suffered a massive stroke that left him speechless for several months and with no real encouragement from the doctors that he would ever regain speech. But after many months, a word came back and he notes with some delight, that it was an expletive, singularly appropriate to the frustration he felt at being without words.

He has been at speech therapy intensively ever since, and although he occasionally still has trouble with the odd word or construction, he is again the witty conversationalist he always was, even though he is temporarily forced to whisper because of recent surgery to remove some recurrent but non-malignant modules.

Central to Cotten’s courtliness is his modesty. His career began shakily and he was at one point all too aware of his “lack of ability, hereinafter softly referred to as my limitations.”

But there was comfort in not being alone: “Without the natural physical endurance of youth, with its blessed ignorance, its lofty arrogance and vanity strong enough to be mistaken for graciousness, all actors would end their careers early.”

These were his young days in Manhattan, when he was already friendly with Orson Welles, in whose Mercury Theater he would soon be a leading figure. But before then, Welles told him: “You’re lucky to be tall and thin and have curly hair. You can also move about the stage without running into the furniture. But these are fringe assets, and I’m afraid you’ll never make it as an actor.”

Then, after enumerating Cotten’s other liabilities, including the traces of his Virginia accent and a lack of training in the classics, Welles said, “But as a star, I think you might well hit the jackpot.”

Cotten had attended the Hickman School of Expression in Washington, but had landed in Miami, selling ads for the Miami Herald and making potato salad as a commercial sideline before he invaded New York. Today, he says he thinks acting schools should be abolished on the grounds that theory is useless without practice and the only way an actor can perfect his craft is in front of audiences.

Welles and Cotten remained friends through thick and thin. Once, when Cotten and his wife were touring with a play, Welles wired him and imperiously ordered him to come immediately to take a part in the film Welles was beginning.

Cotten regretted politely and Welles wired again, “Starting film. Need you. Understand me?” Cotten regretted again and Welles wired back, “Never mind. Hired another actor.” When Cotten saw the film at last, he noted that Welles had in fact played the part himself. “And,” Cotten says in a cackling whisper (assuming that whispers can cackle), “he was half as good as I’d have been.”

Welles, Cotten says, had only one rule for actors, and it was on a sign backstage at the Mercury Theater. “No drinking in the theater except during Shakespeare.” Welles’ notion, Cotten says, was that Shakespeare’s writing is so good that it doesn’t make any difference what the actors are up to.

One of Welles’ several unrealized schemes was to do a sequel to “The Magnificent Ambersons” a quarter-century later. “It would have been a wonderful idea,” Cotten says. “We could all have done it without makeup. But Orson could never get the rights, and then Aggie (Agnes Moorehead) was gone.”

Cotten speaks and writes like a man who has had a ringside seat at a wonderful show in which, from time to time, he has played a part. To him, David O. Selznick was always “Boss,” and Cotten writes of his perfectionist dedication with something like awe. He also went in awe of the intensity of Selznick’s party-giving. “Driving home from David’s parties required no headlights,” Cotten says. “The sun had always risen.”

In his preferences for material, Cotten has been resolutely traditional. “Is it fear of being thought shallow that causes playwrights to change the subject the minute the audience becomes involved . . . particularly emotionally involved?” he asks in the book. “What a pity our writers banished sentimentality to the hospital, almost to the cemetery, for so many years. And give a rally, blow a horn, award a prize to Neil Simon, who has single-handedly restored L-O-V-E to the stage and screen as a respectable four-letter word that can be spoken by actors and heard by audiences without bringing blushes to the faces of either.”

Yet Cotten loved making the film of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance,” and says he loves the play.

The autobiography is clearly his own work, and demonstrably the work of a man with a feeling for words. Cotten had written some theater reviews while he was selling ads for the Miami Herald and, what is not generally remembered, he wrote for Welles the script of “Journey Into Fear,” adapting the Eric Ambler novel. (“He said there had been so many changes he could sell the book again.”)

In his early days in New York, Cotten was a reader for Paramount, writing synopses and analyses and then did some writing for radio.

Great chunks of his manuscript were edited out, including a lot of material about his family. “It was 600 pages before I got to Orson,” Cotten says. The excised material might make a fine second volume.

After years of being taken for granted, thanks to that courtly and well-tempered competence of his, Cotten is getting some of the recognition he has long since earned. The James Stewarts will co-host a book-signing for Cotten at Hunters Books in Beverly Hills at 4:30 p.m. Thursday. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art begins a monthlong retrospective of his films on Friday, and the American Film Institute begins a similar retrospective in Washington on May 24.

Cotten’s dedication to the work was splendidly illustrated during the Bel-Air fire in 1961. The flames seemed about to crest out of Mandeville Canyon and sweep west to the Castellammare section of Pacific Palisades, where the Cottens lived then. All the homeowners were under Fire Department orders to pack their cars and be ready to flee.

There was smoke, ash and high anxiety in the air, but Patricia Medina Cotten remembers her husband walking purposefully downstairs with his dinner jacket and accouterments. “We’ll be putting up in a motel; you won’t need that,” she cried.

“Of course I will,” Joe Cotten said. “I’m wearing it in a TV scene tomorrow.” The wind changed, the fire didn’t arrive, and he did the scene.