Dear friends, I am back from Deepest Suburbia, Pennsylvania, back from the actual factory part of the box factory, back from a frankly tiring week. Even as I did have some nice quality time with my parents, I’m still thrilled to be back home with Lloyd, and I can’t wait to go out and play in the city tomorrow. I was going to save posting for tomorrow, after the market run, on which I hope to buy more grapes for the grape tart recipe I’ve promised to post. Then this morning, on the news station to which my parents listen for the traffic reports, the morning drive-time guy announced that today is the 56th anniversary of the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Normally I feel a bit of a scoundrel when I dip into the archives, but tonight I make no apologies. It has been nearly three years since the magical weekend of which I wrote, and it feels like yesterday. It still feels like magic, and as far as I’m concerned, Miss Neal still rules the universe.
Apologies in advance, dear friends, if the following story contains elements of name-dropping and braggery. I will try as best as I can not to be obnoxious, but it has been such a long time since I had a moment of pure, unvarnished, gleeful pleasure, the kind that kept me at absorbed and rapt attention to the speaker. That moment came yesterday afternoon at the Chesapeake Theatre at Harford Community College, the speaker was Patricia Neal, the subject was Gary Cooper. As long as I live, I will never forget the sound of That Voice, the voice almost unchanged from the one in Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Subject Was Roses: “Oh, I adored him! He was a lovely man and I adored him.” That voice was accompanied by a grand sweeping of her arms, as if she were trying to take the memory of Gary Cooper and hug us all with it. I know I felt hugged by it.
It is an awfully neat story, and an awfully grand adventure; I knew it would be, but I seriously, sorely underestimated how grand it was going to be. I have been at table for two hours, trying to find an eloquent way to say that I am a lucky woman, but eloquence is failing me today, so I might as well opt for plain-spoken truth. I am a lucky woman.
Lloyd and I spent the weekend with my dad and stepmom in Maryland. Going to visit the ‘rents is always a good thing; we relax, we eat well, we drink red wine out of burgundy glasses; we watch Food Network and loudly berate the on-air talent (I find myself turning into Patrick Star and bellowing “Who *are* you people?” at the likes of Michael Chiarello and the low-carb guy); we fuss over, and are fussed over by, the 92-pound American Eskimo puppy and the 15-pound black cat and the 27-pound (this is not a typo) orange cat. We did plenty of that this weekend. We also went to a special screening at the Chesapeake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on Friday night. Between myself, my dad and my Lloyd, we have probably seen this movie a total of 100 times. I never tire of it. I never tire of watching Patricia Neal, cowering in terror before the robot Gort, saving Earth by crying “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” (My father loves this scene so much that he made me promise to physically restrain him, lest he leap up in his chair and start cheering at that moment. Trust me when I say that this was not an easy thing to do, as my dad is a big fellow.) But it has been just long enough since I’ve seen The Day the Earth Stood Still that I had forgotten all the other little perfect moments of that movie: the sheer creepiness of the scene where the world is shut down for half an hour; the scene where Klaatu provides the clues for Professor Barnhardt to solve the puzzle on the blackboard; the scene at the beginning that always made me cry as a little kid, where Klaatu is wounded by a panicked soldier as he tries to present a gift for the President; the scene where Patricia Neal’s would-be fiance decides to turn the fugitive Klaatu in to the Pentagon and says, with braggadocio, “You’ll feel different when you read about me in the papers,” and she says, with wonderment, “I feel different now”; and, really, any scene where Michael Rennie has a lot of screen time. I had forgotten what a fine, fine man Michael Rennie was.
I would have been perfectly happy just watching the movie, but the college had a treat for us, namely Miss Neal, who took introductory questions from HCC professor Wayne Hepler. I was glad to hear that Michael Rennie was as suave as I’d always hoped he’d be ("I loved Michael! He was a wonderful man!"), and I was especially tickled by Miss Neal’s remembering that she continually cracked up on set ("oh, I thought it was hysterical"), so much so that during the shooting of the pivotal taxi scene, Michael Rennie asked her, “Now, Patricia, do you plan on laughing like that in every scene?” If you watch that scene closely, you can see a moment where he almost loses it, where he comes close to breaking character and laughing.
The following afternoon, we went back to the Chesapeake for Professor Hepler’s interview with Miss Neal. To say that she was delightful is to understate the case grossly. She was entertaining and lyrical and funny, candid about her attraction to married men ("oh, I was awful! Just awful!") and generous in her assessment of nearly everyone she worked with. She was full of affection for Gary Cooper (with whom she had had an affair for five years, and whose picture still adorns a wall in her bedroom), for Cary Grant, for Michael Rennie, for Andy Griffith (her co-star in A Face in the Crowd), even for Ronald Reagan, with whom she’d become friends while filming her first movie role, in John Loves Mary. Her voice was saturated with kindness as she remembered Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck; she practically glowed as she remembered one of her teachers in Packard, Kentucky, who fostered her love of acting. She was generous and loving about her ex-husband, Roald Dahl, calling his New Yorker short stories “fantastic” and saying that he had “done a really lovely job” of helping her recover from the three strokes she suffered in a single night when she was 39 years old and pregnant with their daughter Lucy. (Dahl’s efforts at rehabilitation were a source of controversy; many people thought that his rehabilitation regime for her was brutal, but if Miss Neal has any negative feelings about them, they certainly weren’t forthcoming in the interview.) About the only negative word she had in the whole interview was for George Peppard, her co-star in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Apparently she had met him on a previous job and they had got along well, but by the time they started shooting Tiffany’s, Peppard had undergone a complete personality change and become, in her words, “a horrible man! Horrible!...and years later, when I heard he had died, I was glad!” Considering that Miss Neal appeared to adore just about everyone she had ever met or worked with, I can only come to the conclusion that success did indeed spoil George Peppard, and if he felt any bitterness about spending the last years of his professional life on The A-Team, well, he had it coming.
Dear friends, I so wish that there were an extant audio or video file to which I could link, because my transcribing all of this doesn’t begin to do Miss Neal justice. How I wish you could have heard about her speak of her children, of the terrifying day when her infant son Theo was struck by a taxi and was plunged into months of surgeries and close calls, and of the loss of her oldest daughter, Olivia, who contracted a fatal case of measles when she was seven. ("She was a wonderful child, a wonderful wonderful girl...But she is no more, and has not been for a very very long time.") Spoken with sadness, but without tears, with resignation and with deep, deep love.) How I wish you could have heard how smoothly she was able to move from discussing the hardest moments of her life to the most frivolous and whimsical, like the ads for Maxim instant coffee she did in the 1970’s ("It was a job! I wanted to work! And I loved it, it was wonderful coffee!") And I really wish I could show you the look on her face during the discussion of Gary Cooper’s affair with Ingrid Bergman. “I don’t know how many people knew about that,” she said.
“Well, we know it now,” Professor Hepler said, gesturing at the audience and smiling.
Miss Neal looked at all of us, and drawled, “Spread it arouuuuuuund.” The expression on her face was priceless.
I didn’t think the weekend could get any better than this. If we had left at the end of the q&a session and just returned to the ‘rents’ house, my weekend would have been made. But we didn’t. It turns out that the HCC radio station manager, who coordinated the weekend’s events, is good friends with my dad, and thus it was that Lloyd and I were invited to join the station manager and his wife and her relatives, my dad and stepmom, and Miss Neal and her assistant at dinner. At the post q&a cocktail party, she had been looking tired, and we figured she would probably send her regrets and not come to dinner, but come to dinner she did, and she got her second wind quickly. My dad was seated next to her, and several pictures were taken of the two of them staring at each other with adoration. My stepmom was seated across from her; at one point I saw Miss Neal holding both of C’s hands in hers, telling her that her mother had died shortly before her 104th birthday. “I think you’ll live to 103, too,” said C. Miss Neal looked thoughtful. “Oh, I don’t think I want to live to 103. But I think 96 would be good, don’t you?” Lloyd and I sat at the far end of the table and watched, captivated but relieved that the pressure would not be on for us to be clever and charming with the famous movie star. Unfortunately, my dad had other ideas and announced to Miss Neal that his daughter and son-in-law had accompanied them. “Where are they?” she called. “Oh, the flowers are in front of you.” Lloyd obligingly moved the flowers. “Oh, there you are,” she said, and I thought, this is so cool! Patricia Neal is waving at Lloyd! It was at this point that I decided to screw up my courage and move down the table and—gulp—actually chat with Miss Neal. We spent some more time oo-ing and ahh-ing over Cary Grant and Michael Rennie, and I had the sense that if it hadn’t been so late in the evening, I could have had a good two hours’ worth of Gary Cooper stories from her.
“We should get a picture of you two together, for your dad,” said the station manager’s wife, who had been sitting to my right during dinner. I was about to demur prettily, sure that Miss Neal had had enough flashbulbs popping in her face for one day, when she turned to me. “What a good idea,” she said. “Shall we hold hands?” We moved closer to each other, we moved our heads closer together, and I knew the smile I was smiling was not a pretty one; it was the kind of smile you smile when you have had more than a little wine and are anticipating a bright flash in a dark restaurant. I tried to tone the smile down a bit, make it a bit prettier and less frightening, and then I felt my hand being clasped by the woman who saved the world with “Klaatu barada nikto,” the woman who handed George Peppard a check and said “you’re entitled to a week’s paid vacation” with a now-understandable relish, the one that Paul Newman called “the one that got away” in Hud, and I knew that smile wasn’t going anywhere.