I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead (56 page)

She also heard from her attorney, Franklin Roemer, who was apparently
also in the dark about the urgency of Agnes’ medical problems. “When I
called Freddie on March 6th to ask what plane at what hour would be
bringing you in on the 7th (which I’d heard from her earlier was the intended
date, when I called to invite you to a do with us) I took her word for it that
you’d simply found some spare time loose from t.v. to stay in the east until
mid-April. I pooh-poohed the comment of a friend that he’d read in the
papers you were at Mayo’s. ‘Routine check-up.’ Freddie wouldn’t have
known — and she couldn’t be that brilliant an actress to play the scene that
casually. Then Elmer Rigby said yesterday that he’d heard you were
seriously ill at Mayo clinic — and my heart sank. Think I didn’t know how
much I love you till that awful sinking feeling hit me. Today I called
Freddie with terrible trepidation — and can’t tell you how relieved Gladys
and I both are that you’re well and coming home in a couple of weeks . . . ”

Gradually she began to gather strength and began to think about her
career. In May she received an offer to play Mrs. St. Maugham in
The Chalk
Garden
at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut.
Burry Fredrik wrote in his letter offering her the part, “We feel you would
be brilliant in the role.” She was too weak at that point to consider a
stage role.

She signed for a pair of made-for-television movies for ABC, which she
quickly filmed in the early summer. The first was called
Rolling Man
and
starred Dennis Weaver as a man sent to prison. Agnes was cast as his dead
wife’s grandmother who takes care of his sons while he is locked up, until
she is too sick to care for them anymore. Her part was not large, but she
received special billing and got to utilize a country-southern accent. The
second film,
Night of Terror,
cast Agnes as a physical therapist named
Bronsky who tries to motivate a paralyzed woman, played by Donna Mills,
to fight harder to recover the use of her legs. But again, the part was
relatively small, and most of the story was a standard crime drama with the
Mills character hiding from killers. Still, she felt good to be back at work,
and without the income from
Bewitched
she needed the money — and
these made-for-tv movies seemed to utilize older stars in ways that the
current film industry didn’t.

An entrepreneur named Lee
Orgel decided to produce a
revival of
Don Juan in Hell
.
Despite it being over twenty
years since she last played
Dona Ana, Orgel proposed to
cast Agnes in her original role.
Filling the other parts would
be Ricardo Montalban as Don
Juan, Edward Mulhare as the
Devil and Paul Henried as the
Commander. Agnes was happy
to accept, in part, because she
loved the play but also because
it would provide her with
several months of work and
steady income. To direct,
Orgel approached Agnes’ old
Mercury companion, John
Houseman. Houseman accepted
and decided to stay as close to
the Laughton-Gregory formula
as possible — the simple set
with the four actors seated on
stools in front of music stands.
Another reason for this fidelity
may have been due to Agnes’
presence. “Agnes sustained us
with coffee and sandwiches
and stimulated us with admo
nitions about the show she
knew so well. She was mentor
and queen bee, reminding us

of what Laughton had created
so brilliantly 20 years
before — why he made the
choices he did and how he
amended them in response
to audience reaction.” Agnes
enjoyed working with this
cast and had high praise for
them, as they had for her.
Mulhare would recall her
“very high strict professionalism.” Montalban would
always credit Agnes for
making it possible for him
to play Juan.

The show opened, like the original, in the California Central Valley —
but instead of Stockton, it was Fresno where they played before a black-tie
audience. The tour wouldn’t be as extensive as the original but it would still
be exhausting especially for a nearly 72-year-old woman who had a recent
bout with cancer. They would play for two weeks in Chicago in late
September, followed by another two weeks in Boston, and then go on to the
National Theater in Washington, D.C. for three weeks. This was followed
by a week in Cincinnati, two weeks in Philadelphia, a week in Pittsburgh,
a week in Wilmington, Delaware, two weeks in Toronto, culminating in a
four-week engagement at the Palace Theater in New York. In all, 18 weeks
of travel and performances.

In Fresno Agnes gave Ricardo Montalban a pen as an opening night gift.
Addressing his “Dearest Agnes” letter, Montalban warmly thanked her. “I
hate to write! That is I used to hate to write. Now I love it, with this
beautiful pen from a beautiful lady. It’s a joy and a privilege to be in hell
with you.”

Still, the tour seemed to revive Agnes. She was back in the spotlight and
she conducted interview after interview in each city talking about any
number of subjects, including her old nemesis — the modern theatre.
“They don’t write mature, reasoned, scintillating things involving the audience
anymore. My gracious when I go to the theater now, I think maybe this
time the magic will begin. Then, the curtain goes up to reveal a garbage pail
on the stage . . . and I say, ‘oh, not again.’” Or, “Of course, I think we’re
living in a mediocre age anyway, and it’s like a drug. ‘Give me some more
because it feels so good’ is the attitude. Mediocrity is poured into the brains
of the people. Much of the theater is mediocre now. It isn’t like the theater
that I started in. This kind of mediocrity is slovenliness and garbage pails
and dirty words. I’m not interested in constantly feeding people tawdriness
and confusion and chaos. The world is chaotic as it is. Why feed it to them
constantly?”

When Mary Roebling heard that
Don Juan in Hell
was coming to
Philadelphia and New York she wrote Agnes insisting on giving a party in
her honor in Philadelphia (it turned out to be a party honoring the entire
cast), and allowing Agnes the use of her New York apartment, “if you would
not object to my bunking with you on occasion . . .” With 14 rooms it is
doubtful they would be falling all over each other.

There was one person who was distinctly not happy about this revival of
Don Juan in Hell
— Paul Gregory. “Montalban had no background for
Shaw. He didn’t understand the words,” Gregory states. “When Agnes did
(this revival) I sent her a note with one word on it —
WHY
? Of course, I
knew why — she loved to work and needed to work and went through
money like there was no tomorrow.”

The reviews were generally good, but not spectacular. The
Chicago
Tribune
said “Montalban verges on the hammy only occasionally . . .
Mulhare is quite effective . . . Moorehead is cool, coy — quietly playing a
clever obbligato . . . Henried, a firm counter point.”

The Dean of Boston Critics, Eliot Norton wrote, “. . . still a triumphant
theatrical experience . . . Agnes Moorehead knows the high style of Shaw,
the sense of mockery and mischief and behind it a feeling of truth, as Shaw
saw truth.” The
Christian Science Monitor
perhaps summed it up best,
“An event to be welcomed with open arms . . . though doesn’t match its
predecessor.” The
Washington Star and News
was hard on Agnes, “Miss
Moorehead, however, has become a parody of Donna Ana . . . her coquetry
is flagrantly false this time.”

F
ROM
C
ESAR
R
OMERO
: “Dear Agnes wish you and all great success
tonight. Love my elephants (Romero collected
elephant ceramics and received some as a gift
from Aggie). Miss you. Love, Cesar.

In his book,
Final Dress,
John Houseman pays handsome tribute to
Agnes as Donna Ana. “I can see her still, in both engagements, in a lilac
gown of her own designing, with a small gold crown set atop the flaming
red hair that made her the equal, in authority and presence, of the three tall,
handsome, formally clad males with whom she was appearing on stage.”
(Incidentally, while rehearsing
Don Juan in Hell
, Houseman gave Agnes an
autographed copy of his then-current autobiography,
Run-Through
,
personally inscribed: “For Agnes with love and admiration — building and
accumulating during a very long and inspiring association. Above all, with
thanks for her incalculable advice and help with staging and production of
‘Don Juan in Hell’ in its second time around tour.”)

In this same book, Houseman writes bitterly about the review the show
received at the hand of the
New York Times
critic. “Against my emphatic
and frequently repeated advice, an impatient backer insisted on bringing it
into New York, where it ran head on into (critic) Clive Barnes’s irrational
detestation of Shaw and all his works. As a result I had the dubious thrill of
seeing my name in lights for a week over the marquee of the Palace Theatre
on Broadway and the annoyance of receiving one of the worst notices ever
given to a production in which I was involved.” Houseman exaggerates a
bit; the show did play its intended four-week run in New York, not a week.
But he is correct about Barnes’s review in the
New York Times
, it’s devastating
from its first paragraph: “When one stands out of joint with current
dramatic history, one can either fake it or admit it. I prefer to admit it.
Most people who have an opinion on the matter regard George Bernard
Shaw as one of the great playwrights of this century. I do not.” Since he was
prejudiced against Shaw to begin with, one wonders why he was allowed to
review the show. His review goes on to state, “The performance, which was
dull and stilted, did, I gratefully consider, strike a strong but, in retrospect,
unfair blow for anti-Shavianism. The play is not so bad as it appears to be
here.” What must really have stuck in Houseman’s craw is this line: “I did
not see the Laughton version, even by envisioning the former cast, one
senses that it must have been better.” The cast didn’t go unscathed: “ . . . we
have the monotonous delivery of Mr. Montalban whose rise and fall phrasing
runs up and down Shaw’s drearily antithetical phrases like a child on a roller
coaster. Then there is Mr. Henried’s world-weary commander who seems
lazily cynical, and Mr. Mulhare’s decent but tamed, clubbable but foolish,
Devil. These are not electric performances, and though Miss Moorehead
shows some excitement, it is not always sustained.”

The show closed on February 4, 1973, after a run of 24 performances.
But she would be back in New York before the end of the year to mount
one more Broadway opening — and take one final bow.

Agnes stayed on for a bit after
Don Juan
closed, taking in some
Broadway shows and appearing
as a mystery guest on the syndicated version of the popular
panel show,
What’s My Line?
,
which reuniting her with her old
friend Arlene Francis. Then it
was back to California for a
short rest before hopping a jet to
take her to London where she
accepted a role in an NBC twopart mini-series,
Frankenstein:
The True Story,
supposedly based
with more fidelity to Mary
Shelley’s novel. The film had a
stellar cast including James
Mason, Leonard Whiting, David McCallum, Jane Seymour, Michael
Sarrazin, Michael Wilding, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. Agnes
plays Mrs. Blair, Dr. Frankenstein’s housekeeper. Again, it is not a huge role
and part of it is played as an invalid since Mrs. Blair suffers a stroke. This
project would keep Agnes occupied through the early spring of 1973.
When it was shown in the United States on NBC in the fall of 1973, it did
well in the ratings; in Europe it was edited down and eventually released as
a feature film.