Free Dropped Names by Frank Langella Page A

beauty who had obsessed and haunted my young imagination, swaying and dancing for me.
    â€œStay with me, baby. Stay with me tonight.”
    I never shared a sunrise with Rita Hayworth; and I did not try to save her, nor could I have. The best I was able to do was take into my arms someone no longer any of the things she had once been: Movie Star, Princess, Goddess, or Gilda. Just a 54-year-old courageous and gentle woman named Margarita Carmen Cansino, one of God’s lost souls, clinging in the night to a man whose name she could not remember.

LAURENCE OLIVIER
    H e had decreed it would be Larry and Frankie. Or to be more precise, as he would pronounce it: Frankay!
    It was the fall of 1978 and I thought I’d better get it over with. Break the ice. The seventy-one-year-old legendary Sir Laurence Olivier was to play Van Helsing to my Dracula in Universal’s remake of the 1931 classic. I walked down to his rooms in a drafty castle in a place called Tintagel in the south of England. His door had a piece of white paper taped to its upper center. L. Olivier , it read in handwritten black letters. I knocked.
    â€œA moment please,” came a male voice. Seconds later, its owner, a tall, thin, reedy man who appeared to be just shy of one hundred, opened the door a sliver. “Yes, please?”
    â€œI’d like to introduce myself to Sir Laurence,” I said. “We’re going to be working together.”
    â€œOh, Mr. Langella. Of course. Do come in.”
    I stepped into a fairly large sitting room similar to mine and saw a small man, back to me, leaning over a table, fussing with a pair of cufflinks. He turned sharply, upper body still bent, focused on me, then stood ramrod straight. The cufflinks clattered to the table and his arms shot out, palms wide, face beaming. It was a standing-still entrance. I began to cross toward him, but he beat me to it, grabbed both my wrists in an extraordinarily tight hold, and drew me to him.
    â€œDear boy,” he said, fixing his gaze on me and studying my face as if it were a small-print road map. “Oh yes, of course . . . ”
    He let go and began a rapid-fire series of questions about his frocks. Did I think this jacket was suitable? Was the collar too tight? “One wants it a bit more loose, I feel. Gives one a fragile appearance.” I couldn’t imagine him looking any more fragile. He was at the time suffering from a rare blood disorder, paper thin, a bit hard of hearing, and unsteady on his feet. Other than that, he seemed made of cast iron. A master of deception who, long ago, I sensed, had lost touch with the simple act of just being. The artifice of his persona was, no doubt, long practiced and I knew instinctively that I was in danger. I was in the presence of a predatory animal who had caught me in his sights, and I would need to be on guard for the next several months.
    We discovered that a connecting door joined our two suites, both of which overlooked a lawn leading to the sea. “We can have tea in the morning, dear boy, or a bit of champers after work. Do come in any time.” His arm was tight in mine as he ushered me to the door.
    â€œOh, it’s going to be something, isn’t it?” And I was in the hallway again. Ice broken. Already refreezing. Laurence Olivier had the extraordinary ability to embrace and dismiss you in one gesture.
    That afternoon there was a first reading of the script. He was in full costume. “Never too soon to break it in,” he said. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and we began. The reading was perfunctory, uneventful, and courteous. At one point he had this line to say: “I shall have to cut off her head and stuff her mouth with garlic.” He turned to our director John Badham and exclaimed:
    â€œI shall need to say that line directly into the lens, dear boy!”
    â€œWould you like to have dinner?” I asked after the reading. His