Mixing Life and Art

The greatest actors have the power to create such moments on stage or on screen that the viewer, remembering, can’t quite be sure whether it is the actor or the character who comes to mind.

For many of us, Jason Robards, who died Tuesday at the age of 78, was as good and credible a newspaperman as any of us ever knew. As Ben Bradlee, the high-powered editor at the Washington Post in “All the President’s Men,” Robards seemed an editor to the marrow of his bones and the soles of his feet. The image of Robards as Bradlee, having made the crucial decision to publish the Watergate revelations, rocking back in a swivel chair, hands locked behind his head, is fixed in mind forever.

In another scene a bit later, Robards, still in a dinner jacket from Bradlee’s interrupted party, walks through the deserted city room, touching each desk oddly, like a father saying good night to his children. Bradlee in life might not have entertained such a sentimental thought, but Robards wordlessly conveyed the thought and made it moving.

It was the late director Alan Pakula’s masterpiece, and, watching, you had the feeling that Pakula had no need to coach Robards (and knew it), because in the way of superlative actors, Robards had for the duration of the film become Bradlee.

It’s ironic that a cinematic moment of Robards is what hovers in memory. The actor himself quotably said that Hollywood was where he made the money that enabled him to afford to work on stage, where his soul resided. Hollywood was in fact almost the end of him. During the years when he was sowing whole plantations of wild oats, he very nearly killed himself driving into a Malibu mountainside. The long recuperation was not the end of his courtship with alcohol, but it was the beginning of a particular end and the start of all the great work of his full maturity.

We sat together in 1977 at the Governors’ Ball after the Academy Awards, the year he won best supporting actor for his Bradlee characterization. The Harry James Orchestra was playing, and Harry himself was blowing all his familiar pieces. I was paying rapt attention to the music and so was Robards. He leaned over and said, “Are you back there?” We both were.

Movie acting is a particular challenge--attempting to fit together a characterization from minute bits of film captured, very likely, over a period of days and weeks or months. (Peter O’Toole was on “Lawrence of Arabia” for eight months.) It is quite unlike the challenge of developing the arc of a character over the course of a single performance, repeated night after night and being honed and minutely adjusted each time. The difference in challenges weds the stage actor to the stage--if he or she can find enough work to keep alive.

In the nature of things, Robards has left a relatively small body of memorable work on film, including his Dashiell Hammett in “Julia”; his Ben Bradlee; Dick Diver in “Tender Is the Night”; the film version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” as Jamie Tyrone; and as the comic, credible star of Herb Gardner’s “A Thousand Clowns.”

On stage, it must be said that Robards, in the tradition of the actor’s art, created a body of roles that live on (in credits, citations and honors in which Robards abounded), but finally, as living performances must, survive only in the grateful memories of those who saw them and who can say they heard Hickey’s searing final monologue in the revivals of “The Iceman Cometh,” or as the F. Scott Fitzgerald prototype in Budd Schulberg’s “The Disenchanted.”

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It is occasionally said of writers, as it is of dramatic actors, that the more they have experienced privately, notably in the areas of pain and suffering, the better and more ennobled their work will be. This is a sobering thought for anyone who can take suffering or leave it alone. Yet it is entirely believable that all the early insecurities, tumultuous marriages and raucous escapades that Robards knew informed and gave their unforgettable depths to his work.

He leaves a unique and enviable legacy, and one in which the life informed the craft. I last saw him a few years ago at the old Russian Tea Room in New York, lunching with his cousin Tom Prideaux, who had been the entertainment editor at Life magazine when I worked there. They were ensconced in one of the honored side banquettes near the front, as befitted a star.