A Role She Tried to Refuse

None of “my men,” as Zoe Caldwell calls her family, has buttons on anything he wears. That’s because one of the world’s great stage actresses can’t sew them on. Numbers are a problem for Caldwell too. They simply don’t add up.

“I just disregard maths. I don’t take into consideration numbers, and that has been a good way to get rid of it,” crows the Australian-born actress.

So when a prominent New York book editor called and asked if she would write a memoir, Caldwell politely declined, saying her learning disability would make that quite impossible. “I don’t even write letters,” she told him, “but thank you for asking me.”

Bob Weil, W.W. Norton’s executive editor, wasn’t so easily dissuaded. What he had in mind was not your monthly book club, “womb to tomb” memoir. He had proposed Caldwell as a candidate for last year’s Norton Lectures, a prestigious, 3-year-old collaboration between the publishing house and the New York Public Library. The first two lectures were given by Random House editor and “Book Business” author Jason Epstein and Yale European history professor emeritus Peter Gay, who also oversees the series. And now the Norton Lectures powers that be had set their sights on Caldwell.

“It was my idea,” Weil says. “I think she’s our preeminent stage actress. And I felt that she had a story to tell that could inspire and influence people. I said, ‘Either it will come out of you in a torrent and you’ll realize you can do it, or you’ll understand you can’t.’”

She could and she did. Caldwell, 68, just disregarded her mild dyslexia and problems with certain motor skills, and wrote her early life story by longhand. Last fall, she delivered the lectures, which Norton recently published in a pocket-size volume titled “I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey.”

London critic Benedict Nightingale applauded her voyage in the New York Times, comparing Caldwell’s writing to her acting, which he calls “hugely versatile yet always lucid.” That sentiment is echoed on the back cover by other aristocrats of the theater, such as Arthur Miller and Terrence McNally, who writes that the memoir is “exactly like her acting: clean, direct and magnificent.” McNally wrote the role of Maria Callas in “Master Class” for Caldwell, who won a Tony, her fourth, for her acclaimed performance after creating the character at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1995.

That production went on to New York, and during that time, Caldwell bonded with soprano Audra McDonald, whom she calls “our Sophie,” referring to her role as one of Callas’ students in “Master Class.” “She was extraordinary,” Caldwell says. “They were all extraordinary. I didn’t go on to London because they weren’t going on to London, and I said, ‘I’m not going without them.’ I’m no fool. They made it so easy.

“Well, Audra and I became like....” She pauses, searching for the right word. “She’s got a terrific mum, a perfectly good mum of her own, so we didn’t become mother and daughter, but we sure became very close. And she has a little girl called Zoe. Zo, she calls her.”

That’s what Caldwell’s intimates call her. It rhymes with “dough” although, on paper, it’s spelled Zoe. Her family came up with the nickname to distinguish her from her mother, also named Zoe (pronounced Zo-ee). “[Zo] always seemed like a cozy name, and if anyone said Zo-ee, I was, ohhh what have I done now?”

For Caldwell, Callas was a landmark role, but Cleopatra was a watershed. She says that when she played Shakespeare’s heroine opposite Christopher Plummer in a 1967 production of “Antony and Cleopatra” in Ontario, Canada, she emerged from the experience fully formed as an artist and a woman. That’s why Cleopatra gets top billing in the memoir. And there the story ends.

“She demanded more of me than I’d ever had demanded of me before,” Caldwell says, “and therefore she demanded that I break certain bounds and bonds, and be prepared to dare more and feel safe in the daring. And I just knew that that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, this is how I’ll be as an actress.’ And Robert [Whitehead, her husband] had come into my life, so the two things came together, as a woman and as an actress, the formation of both.”

That’s where Caldwell put down her pen, because Weil’s assignment had been to focus on the part of her life that constituted “the makings of a great stage actress,” the editor says.

“At what point did you just realize you had it? My inspiration was Eudora Welty’s ‘One Writer’s Beginnings,’ and I felt Zoe is comparable as an actress. Those who know stage acting know there’s no one better in America today. I was interested in what in her childhood gave us the clues. If you’re crazy enough to consider a career in the arts, what do you need to know? I felt that Zoe would be a splendid person to guide you.”

Caldwell is certainly “actressy,” but in the best--and possibly rarest--sense of the word. Some actors take up all the oxygen in a room, turning other people into an ad hoc audience. In contrast, Caldwell gently demands participation, punctuating many of her declarations with the invitation, “Don’t you think?” She’s warm, expressive and self-effacing. As she arrives at the little Italian cafe across the street from her pied-a-terre in the theater district (she and Whitehead live in Pound Ridge, N.Y.), she embraces the owner like a long-lost relative. Today, she’s simply dressed in a black shirt and pants. Her short shock of gray hair is well cut but obliviously tousled, and her face appears free of makeup except for smudges of kohl dramatizing her eyes.

As she speaks, her hands paint elaborate air pictures, never tracing the same pattern twice. Describing a role, she sometimes gazes off into the distance as if she’s observing her character anew on some invisible plane. Theatrical, to be sure, but one gets the sense that that’s genuinely who she is, not someone she wants you to see.

Caldwell was a Depression baby in Melbourne, Australia, the daughter of a taxi dancer and a spunky plumber who believed Sundays were best spent attending vaudeville, opera, plays and musicals rather than church. “He felt ... that theater allowed all your senses full rein and church, as he knew it, reined them in,” she writes.

Caldwell grew up seeing every performer who came to Melbourne. She writes that she bought tickets for “the gods,” the cheapest seats, where “packers” with padded brooms crammed theatergoers into the least space possible. At age 9, she made her professional stage debut as Slightly Soiled, one of the lost boys in “Peter Pan.” She soon moved on to radio serials and, briefly, an ultimately misguided attempt to work at a pickle factory under an assumed name, “a part that I seemed born to play.”

At 19, Caldwell joined Australia’s oldest professional theater company, the Union Theatre Repertory Company (now the Melbourne Theatre Company), where she met the “wicked, smart as a whip, and infuriating” Barry Humphries, who had already created “Mrs. Edna Everage from Humoresque Street,” or Dame Edna. Humphries, then “thin as a pin,” liked to pretend he was spastic when he walked down the street so he could see how much pity he could summon in other people.

Six years later, Caldwell had a contract with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon in England, where she worked with Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Ian Holm, Paul Robeson and Sam Wanamaker. That experience set the stage for a career that spanned three continents.

Caldwell’s memoir is peppered with casual references to the remarkable theater talents who have populated her life, such as “Tony”--either Richardson or Tyrone Guthrie--and “Hume and Jess,” the distinguished acting couple Hume Cronyn and the late Jessica Tandy, who kept fixing her up with Cronyn’s first cousin, theatrical producer-director Robert Whitehead, until it stuck. In the book, Edith Evans passes on her pre-curtain tip for ensuring the whitest hands--hold them up to drain them of blood. Caldwell also writes candidly about playwrights whose work she performed, those she liked (such as Tennessee Williams) and those she didn’t (Eugene Ionesco).

Of the elegiac Williams, she says she didn’t actually work with him when she performed in his play “Slapstick Tragedy,” for which she won her first Tony in 1966 even though the run lasted a mere 10 days. (She also won Tonys for playing the title roles in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1968 and “Medea” in 1982.)

“He was there every day, but by the time he was at the theater, he was gone.” She discreetly declines to elaborate. “But I did work with him, because I worked with his script. I didn’t need the actual person, because I had the whole essence of him in the script. I love him because he’s a poet. He’s an artist--and I use that word very rarely. He shows us his vision of something, and forever afterward we then see his vision.”

Ionesco doesn’t get such rave reviews. Caldwell got to know the existentialist playwright when she performed in his play “Jacques” as a bride with three noses.

“He was a little, round drunken man,” she says. “He had a very Parisienne, tiny, tiny wife, much makiage [makeup] very, very, very French and very bossy and trying to keep him in order. And I just didn’t understand what it was all about. The plays. I really didn’t. But that was the next job I was offered, so I took it. He hasn’t lasted. It was the Theater of the Absurd. The things that really last continually tell about the human condition combating whatever--the political and social madness that is abounding. I think the playwriting that’s coming out of this time should be very thrilling, don’t you?”

Another famous name that surfaces in the memoir is Albert Finney, with whom she had an affair, breaking her own rule never to date an actor she was working with. “The marvelous thing about sleeping with somebody is that you’ve got all sorts of secret things that nobody else knows about, just you two for the period of the affair,” she says. “So they’re bound to come onstage, those secret, secret things. And you’re there giving secret signals. The audience doesn’t know anything about that, the rest of the actors don’t know anything about that, and the thrilling thing about theater is to let the audience in on everything. You can act the hell out of the first time, but it doesn’t work, because there’s already a knowledge.”

In the book, she keeps most of their secrets secret. She writes that she met Finney in a 1959 production of “Othello” in England. They apparently bonded over a steaming bowl of eucalyptus when the actor was forced to battle his cold so he could step in for Olivier, who couldn’t perform in “Coriolanus” because he’d damaged his knee tap dancing. Initially, Caldwell doesn’t identify Finney as the actor for whom she broke her own rule, writing only: “I had an explosive affair with an actor in the company, causing a lot of havoc and pain, for which I apologize.” Later in the book, she acknowledges that she was served papers in Finney’s divorce proceedings.

Caldwell says she deliberately shied away from the kiss-and-tell genre. “I can’t bear people talking about their ‘and then I slept and went to the Riviera with blah blah blah.’ Who cares? That’s for gossip columnists. But I did want to make the point clear that I did a lot of damage, because he was married and had a little year-old boy, and I broke up the marriage. I didn’t want to say all that, but I thought I’d tell them so that the book doesn’t end with people saying, ‘I wonder who it was she had an affair with.’ I tell them in a way that makes me look like a fool.”

To say that Caldwell is invested in her craft is like saying Rapunzel had long hair. When she made her Broadway debut as a disabled nun in John Whiting’s “The Devils,” she prepped for the part by walking around town mimicking curvature of the spine. To play Lord Horatio Nelson’s zaftig mistress Emma Hamilton in a London production of Terrence Rattigan’s “A Bequest to the Nation,” she shot up to 180 pounds, piling the weight on her slight, 5-foot-21/2-inch frame. And when she writes about her characters, she describes them in much the same way she describes real people.

“I really believe they should have a history and you should really know their history very well, because then they’re a whole person to you,” she says. “Otherwise what you play is an evil person or a good person. It’s not up to you to make that decision. Playwrights make that decision by the way they write the character. What you’ve got to do is find the character and show him. When Laurence Olivier was playing Iago, Tony Guthrie came back to see him, and Larry said, ‘I really loathe him.’ And Tony Guthrie said, ‘You shouldn’t be playing him then, should you?’”

Such intensity isn’t easy to leave at the stage door. Caldwell writes that it took her six months to regain her sense of self after Cleopatra.

“That’s what it takes every role now,” she says. “I mean Jean Brodie took a long, long time. Medea took a long time to just get back--this sounds so corny, artsy--but if you give all of yourself--it happens in life too--if you give all of yourself to a person and they move away, they take what you’ve given them with them. Then who are you?”

Caldwell acknowledges that her deep immersion in her roles has sometimes been hard on her husband and children, Sam, 32, a theater critic, and Charlie, 29, an aspiring theater producer. “Kids, dogs, husbands, they all know when you take yourself away,” Caldwell says. “You can be saying, ‘How was school?’ But actually they know that you don’t give a damn. What you’re really concerned with is something to do with whoever the character is.”

These days Caldwell is on hiatus from the theater while she spends time with her theatrical family, but she isn’t planning on writing about them again. She says there won’t be a second act for her memoirs. The final chapter is finished. The end.

Says Caldwell: “Very few people knew about volume one. Everybody knows about volume two. They know all the pieces that have been in all the magazines. I would like to keep writing, just about people. Not me.” She laughs. “I’ve written about me.”

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Irene Lacher is a frequent contributor to Calendar.