All Her Life’s a Stage

There is an enviable serenity about Ellen Geer, a sense that she knows who she is and the value of what she does.

At an age when many actresses realistically fear being cast as some grotesque out of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” she is artistic director of Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon and its most visible star.

Highly regarded as a performer, director and writer, she also works with students at UCLA and elsewhere, experiencing the deep satisfaction that comes from sharing one’s personal and professional values.

And because it is summer--the funky outdoor theater’s season--she stars in and/or directs all four of this year’s plays--Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical version of the cult film “Harold and Maude” and Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

Yet Geer’s life has been anything but serene. As the child of actor Will Geer and actress Herta Ware, she grew up in a spirited extended family of actors, folk singers and political activists. Her father, best known today as wise, crusty Grandpa on the TV classic “The Waltons,” is also remembered for having helped transform Woody Guthrie from a skinny Okie balladeer into the reigning giant of American folk song.

Despite her parents’ unapologetic leftist politics, her dad was a success in post-World War II Hollywood, admired for his ease as a Shakespearean actor and always able to get movie roles as the pal of the guy who actually got the girl. In those heady days, Will’s agent was often on the phone with good news, and Will, Herta, Ellen and her older sister, Kate, lived well in Santa Monica, where Will, who had a degree in botany, loved his garden almost as much as performing.

Fortunes Change With Blacklisting

In 1951, it all fell apart. Her father was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and grilled about his ties to the Communist Party.

“I was 10 when we were in our fancy house and the whole big thing happened,” Ellen says. Her father had never pretended to be anything but an activist--for years, he had done in-your-face political theater in coal mines, factories and fields full of migrant workers, often with Guthrie, Odetta or some other folk singer at his side.

Herta had demonstrable ties to the American Communist Party: Her grandmother, “Mother” Ella Bloor, was one of its founders. But Will had never joined the party. “He never joined anything,” Ellen recalls. “He was too much of a gardener.”

Nonetheless, when Geer appeared before the committee, making an unforgettable entrance in a bright purple shirt, he exercised his constitutional right not to answer by invoking the 5th Amendment.

He was promptly blacklisted.

It is hard to imagine today the impact of the blacklist--the sense of helpless terror it evoked. “It’s still a word that puts people into shivers,” says Ellen, whose play about the period, “ . . . And the Dark Cloud Came,” premiered at the Theatricum in 1995.

For Will, being added to the growing list of industry personnel denied work because of their leftist leanings meant being shunned by employers and former friends. For 10-year-old Ellen, it meant her fellow fifth-graders began to say mean things.

Worse was to come. The Geers spent a winter in Wellesley, Mass., in an apartment without furniture or heat. For a time, they were homeless, before that term became part of the American lexicon. For almost nine months, they lived in a park in Las Vegas, evicted by the police from time to time, only to move back in when it was safe. Without money for food, they sometimes stole it.

“It was quite horrifying,” Ellen says. “I don’t know how my parents did it.”

When she puts the best spin on those years, Ellen insists: “It was scarring, but it also gave us a strength. It was almost like being a pioneer.”

Actors were the most vulnerable of the blacklisted. As Ellen’s mother writes in a memoir of the time: “Many a blacklisted writer has functioned fully with his blacklisted label covered by a pseudonym. . . . But actors, wholly dependent on their faces, voices, and their whole presence, have nowhere to hide. Bravo to those who pushed on through, whose health and libido remained intact and blossomed sweeter than ever through all that manure. Infinite sadness for those who could not. They were cut off in their prime.”

No stranger to the havoc redbaiters could wreak, Ellen’s mother proposed that the family take what money they had and buy property in Topanga, then a genuine stretch of country without city water or electricity. They bought almost five acres. “She knew Poppa would be happy there with all that land and farming,” Ellen says.

The Geers grew their own food and sold fruits, vegetables and herbs to make money. “Real mountain people” lived in the canyon in those days, Ellen remembers, “and it was a paradise to me as a kid,” albeit a paradise with the occasional rattlesnake. Once, a mountain lion attacked their chickens. The Geers and their friends entertained each other at frequent hootenannies. Will also established a rustic theater for himself and other blacklisted artists. The performances were free. The Geers made a few bucks by selling hot dogs at the shows.

In 1952, Woody Guthrie moved into a shack next to the Geers’ house on the Topanga property. Woody’s Shack, as it is called, still stands, and Ellen would like to see it become a museum. Already showing signs of Huntington’s chorea, the devastating neurological disorder that would slowly kill him, Guthrie passed his time making clay pots, heating up cans of his favorite chili on an outside barbecue and running around naked. Ellen denies the assertion of Guthrie biographer Joe Klein that the singer wrote erotic letters to her and her sisters, much to Herta’s chagrin. But, she concedes, “he had the hots for my older sister, Katie.

“And, oh, God, yes,” he liked to go naked, Ellen says. “He was a beatnik, a hippie, before all those were invented.”

Ellen says her father never became embittered as a result of the blacklist, and eventually reconciled with friends like Burl Ives who turned on their fellow leftists during the period. Although Geer didn’t take his own life, or sink into alcoholism or despair, as some did, his long exile took its toll on his marriage.

He and Herta divorced, although they continued to perform together and remained close. Herta, Ellen, Kate and other family members were with Will when he died in 1978, at the age of 76. Moments before, they had all been singing Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

The way some families trust in the consolations of religion, the Geers believe in the restorative power of great literature. When Ellen was 15 or 16, Will gave her a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare.

“He said, ‘Whenever you’re feeling blue, whenever you’re feeling down, read this, and you’ll be fine.’ It was so true,” she said.

Steeped from childhood in theater and music (she plays the guitar, banjo, accordion, piano and dulcimer and writes music), Ellen was 19 when actor and impresario Tyrone Guthrie asked her to join the prestigious new theater company he was putting together in Minneapolis. “I was his Ophelia,” recalls Ellen, who describes Guthrie as “a mammoth theater man.”

Guthrie’s company had several established stars, including Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, but Guthrie practiced theatrical democracy. One day he had all his players form a circle and read choruses from Greek plays. It was a way to accustom the actors to listening to each other and also a reminder that everyone in the troupe was equal--lessons that Ellen passes on to her students today.

Ellen also has great affection for the late John Houseman, the radical producer/director who became an octogenarian icon in the film “The Paper Chase” and memorable TV ads for brokerage house Smith Barney. As director of the now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., Houseman offered Geer work when no one else would. “He hired many wonderful people who were bruised by the blacklist,” she recalls. “He had the guts to do that.”

A member of the repertory companies of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, New York City’s Assn. of Producing Artists and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, Ellen played Saint Joan, Rosalind, Desdemona and other epic roles for women.

She has also done film and television, including featured parts in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger” (she’s the striking gray-haired, blue-eyed CIA aide who assists Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan).

‘A Grass-Roots Theater’ Still

Ellen inherited her father’s role as the driving force of the Theatricum, where she has been artistic director since 1979. Under her laid-back administration, the theater has become increasingly professional, but it’s still “a grass-roots theater,” she assures, “not posh.”

A program that brings schoolchildren, their teachers and parents to the theater was instituted in 1979. A full-fledged repertory company was established in 1983, and the site’s first real theater was built, by local volunteers, in 1984.

On a summer day, the theater is full of youngsters, wearing capes and happily whacking away at each other with wooden swords. In the open theater under the oaks, its seats climbing the hillside, rehearsals are underway for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Shakespeare Garden that Will lovingly created is in full bloom.

As always, the theater is a family affair. Ellen’s 22-year-old daughter, Megan Geer-Alsop, a sculptor and painter, will play Helena in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which Ellen will direct. Daughter Willow, 19, is starring as Emily in “Our Town,” in which Ellen plays the Stage Manager and co-directs. Son Flanders did the music for “The Taming of the Shrew” and plays Flute in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Sister Melora stars as Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew,” among other roles. Brother Thad plays Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ellen’s husband, Peter Alsop, runs the youth concert series, and her mother has roles in both Shakespearean plays. Assorted nieces and nephews are also in the company.

Ellen, who has a sense of the cyclical nature of life that every close reader of Shakespeare and every student of gardens acquires, also stars this summer as Maude in the stage version of “Harold and Maude,” Hal Ashby’s darkly comic film about the May-December romance between an eccentric young man and an elderly woman.

Twenty-eight years ago, Ellen appeared in the film as one of the string of girls his own age that Harold dates to disastrous effect. Now she is bringing her own spin to the life-addicted old woman played, in the film, by Ruth Gordon. Ellen’s interpretation is grounded in the fact that the woman survived a Nazi death camp, an unspeakable horror that makes her savor every moment. “That’s what makes her what she is,” Ellen says.

With her husband, Ellen recently co-directed and starred in an independent film that they hope to take on the festival circuit. Written by Alsop, it is called “After Romeo” and shows what might have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived, set in modern times.

As a working actress, not a superstar, Geer has done the odd horror movie as well as played Joan of Arc. In her family, being able to work was understood to be a precious thing, but not more precious than principles.

“I was brought up that you take the first thing that comes along,” she says. “The only thing I ever turned down was a beer commercial and a cigarette commercial.”

*

The Theatricum Botanicum, at 1419 Topanga Canyon Blvd. in Topanga, will host a fund-raiser at 4 p.m. Saturday. “The Strength of Women” features portraits, with music, of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf and other women who fought for equality, and will star Tyne Daly, Mariette Hartley and Wendie Malick. Tickets are $50. A reception with the artists follows the concert performance. For more information, call the box office at (310) 455-3723.