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9780307594686

Luck and Circumstance

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780307594686

  • ISBN10:

    0307594688

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2011-09-27
  • Publisher: Knopf

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Summary

From acclaimed director Michael Lindsay-Hogg ( The Normal Heart, Brideshead Revisited, Let It Be, etc.), son of glamorous Warners' movie star Geraldine Fitzgerald ( Dark Victory, Wuthering Heights, etc.): a magical dreamscape memoir of his boyhood, coming of age, and making his way in the worlds of theater, film, and television. He writes of growing up in Santa Monica, encountering the likes of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; being surrounded by his mother's pals, Hollywood's elite-Olivier, Chaplin, Orson Welles, et al.-and eyeing a life in the theater as Fitzgerald worked in stage productions in New York. At the book's center, an offhand comment made to him by his mother about rumors circulating (false, she claimed) that she had a romantic relationship with Orson Welles . . . and that Welles was Michael's father. ( ;You know how people put two and two together and get three, ; she said.) As Lindsay-Hogg struggled to make sense of it all, questions of missed chances, conversations never had, questions of what is withheld and what is true took root, dogging him, shaping his life . . . questions still, that haunt and inform this deft, irresistible memoir.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

One

At first the path seems clear with some light on it butas the slope grows steeper, mist comes around it and then, farther, the top iscovered in cloud and I have no idea what I'll find there.

The terrain is memory and it is time to start.


Although we were only there for a year or so, I say I grew up on the beach in Santa Monica, because it's where I was happy or, at least, in hindsight, think that's what I was. We moved there when I was just four. Prior to that my mother, nurse Mary, and I moved around a lot, every six months from one small house in the Hollywood or Beverly Hills to another.

At first, when I was young, my mother told me my fatherhad left us to go back to Ireland to work for the Irish Red Cross. He had beenfund-raising for the Red Cross during his time in America.

Edward Lindsay-Hogg, English-born, had become an Irish citizen in the mid-1930s.

He liked living there because I think England frightenedhim, or his memories were too painful. The grandson of baronet Sir Lindsay Lindsay-Hogg, a tough old man whose family had made money in the China trade, he was the sonof an invalid father whose back had been broken in a hunting accident and anervous clinging mother, and his older brother was vicious, if not a littledemented. Brutal years at Eton did not help a temperament already somewhatfragile. Then, when he was seventeen, it was my father who, his mother late returning from being out with the hunt, mounted his horse and went in search ofher. He found her body in a stream, her foot still in the stirrup. Her horse hadn't budged from the narrow slatted sideless bridge, from which she'd fallen or been thrown.


I was two when my father left, and I would not see himfor three years and then, after that, only every couple of years when my mother would go to Ireland to see her parents and I would have occasional meetings with Edward Lindsay-Hogg. I did not see him at all between the ages of thirteenand eighteen. He never returned to America after he left in early 1943.

Later, my mother changed the story to say the real reasonmy father left us was because he hadn't wanted to be drafted into the American army. As a resident alien, after Pearl Harbor, he was liable to be called upand thought he wouldn't have been a good soldier and wished to return toneutral Ireland.

I always thought it odd that my father continued to loveand understand horses, given the family tragedies which had occurred. And itwas horses which had brought him to Ireland. He liked race meetings; as agentleman jockey over six feet tall, he'd braved the jumps and, after a while,began training. He understood horses and their eccentric natures. Also in hisspare time he wrote songs of a slightly sentimental sort, in a 1930s way. InIreland, he met my mother, home on a visit from England, where she was startingher career as an actress. She did not often come home to see her family, onlyto spend a little time with her beloved brother, my uncle David, who introducedher to his race-going chum, Eddy Lindsay-Hogg. If asked, and if she hadn't beenfrightened of saying she was frightened, she would have said she was frightenedof her father and would have wished her mother to be more of an intermediary,but her mother, although tender and protective when she was not in bed withmysterious illnesses, was often in bed with mysterious illnesses, and so forweeks or months at a time she would lie in the darkened room at the top of thehouse, on the floor above the room in which her husband still slept in what hadbeen their marriage bed.

My mother's father was a lawyer in the firm which borehis father's and uncle's names. Their premises, D. and T. Fitzgerald, arementioned in James Joyce'sUlyssesas a place Leopold Bloom passes on hisramble around Dublin on June 16. As a young man, having been sent foradvancement to England, my grandfather had been apprenticed to the chambers ofthe Lord Chancellor and seemed to be on the road to a successful legal career, until one morning he woke up and decided he would never again go above the third floor of a building. He returned to Ireland, henceforth to exist onfloors one, two, and three, married and had four children, my mother the secondand her favorite brother the eldest. My grandfather was given to depression andviolent outbursts and was irrationally fearful of bankruptcy. He instilled a morbid fear about money, or the lack of it, in his two eldest children.

After the time my grandmother took to her narrow bed, themaid who came in daily to do the house would find every morning under mygrandfather's bed copies of old weekly news magazines, a half-empty bottle of sherry, and a half-full chamber pot.


When they became engaged, my father wrote to an aunt inlanguage which was of the period, but which I find curious, and explained hisfeelings: "Geraldine is a dear girl and I am very fond of her."


My mother, having had some success in small British Quota Quickies-films made cheaply in order to maintain a quota of jobs in the struggling film industry-decided to try her luck in America. It was 1938 and she was twenty-four. The ship docked in New York and my mother and her husbandof three years put themselves up in a small hotel on the East Side. As their money was running out, my mother got an interview for a job at the Mercury Theatre, which was run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, then twenty-two. Houseman and my mother discussed the part of Ellie Dunn, the ingenue, if a Shavian character can be described that simply, inHeartbreak House, which Orson Welles would direct and star in. My mother didn't think the interview had gone well, perhaps because Houseman drew it to a conclusion by saying: "Thank you. Let's keep in touch." She rose to leave and at that very moment a door into another room opened and the person described as the "boy genius" came into the room. Orson Welles looked toward my mother and, on this first sight, said to Houseman, "She's perfect." And then, looking directly at my mother, said, "The part is yours," adding disarmingly, "if you want it, that is."

They calculated her salary based on what my mother and father needed each week for lodging, food, and transportation.

A year afterThe Doctor's Dilemma, I was now fifteen andagain home on a holiday from boarding school and my mother was to play GonerilinKing Lear, starring and directed by Orson Welles. By this time, my mother knew I wanted a career in the theater. She'd asked Orson Welles if I could attend afew rehearsals.

"All of them," he'd said.

I shared a cab with my mother on that early December day in 1955. The rehearsals were in a building on the West Side. We went up in a wheezy elevator and into a large room with white tape marks on the floor. Wehung our coats, her old fur and my duffle, on a metal rack.

Orson Welles was at a wooden table in discussion with thestage manager. When he saw us, he rose and came to us.

"Orson, this is Michael."

"I'm so happy to meet you," he said, transferring his cigar to his left hand and holding out his right. I shook his large warm hand.

"Me too," I said.

He was glorious at that time, forty years old, tall, broad, dressed in black, starting to be heavy but not nearly with the weight which must have partly killed him. A big head with glossy dark hair, alert amused brown eyes under the broad forehead, with his enveloping, welcoming seductive voice. But there was something else to him, a kind of emanation of energy and intelligence, curiosity, and originality.

Day after day, I sat there watching the play as it developed, as Orson shaped scenes and marshaled the crowd of soldiers andcourtiers. He'd catch my eye often, winking sometimes, sometimes a smile. Or, if one of the actors was not doing a good job, he'd look at me and roll hiseyes.

The critic and translator Eric Bentley was also presentat some of the rehearsals, and one afternoon we were both asked to leave by the stage manager. We were told Orson was on his way back from lunch and was goingto fire one of the actors and didn't want anyone other than the company around. He wanted to get rid of the actor, hire another, and go on working.

The next morning I sat in my room wondering if my paradise was gone forever when my mother, her coat on, came in.

"Let's go," she said.

"Is it okay?"

"Yes, of course. Orson called and said he hadn't meant for you to be told to go. He wants you there all the time. He likes you being there. He said it's important to have someone watching rehearsals who's so interested."

Soon after, the company moved onto the stage at the City Center to rehearse at night. Orson was prowling the unlit orchestra watching the bright action onstage where a stand-in was going through King Lear's movesand reading the lines. As he passed behind the seat I was sitting in, my leftarm over the seat beside me, Orson stopped.

I felt a quick aware tension with him behind me, unmoving in the dark.

A moment. Then, as if to clarify his presence, he laidhis right hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, kneading it twice, the secondpressure stronger than the first, and then he continued on.

I was not used to being touched by male family members.My stepfather had taught me how to shake hands and look the other person in theeye, but he had not been brought up to be a hugger of males, and this was inthe middle of the five-year period when I was not to see Edward Lindsay-Hogg atall.


I suppose I longed for a father.


I felt, if it had been my bare shoulder, I wouldn't haveever washed his touch off.


I had to go back to school, and could not be present fort he opening. A few days before, Orson had hurt an ankle and was limping and then, after the final preview, my mother told me, Marlene Dietrich had been inOrson's dressing room and he had said to his beautiful Italian new wife, twenty-five-year-old Countess Paola Mori, pointing toward Marlene Dietrich, who was his best friend," Isn't she the most beautiful woman in the world?" Paola had pushedhim, playfully or not, but forcefully enough for him to fall and crack theother ankle. He played the opening night and the rest of the run in a wheelchair and I would not see him for four years.

That next summer, I had my first job in the theater, atthe American Shakespeare Festival, in Stratford, Connecticut, which was run by Jack Houseman, who had become one of my mother's greatest friends. "Friends" was not a word to describe the relationship between Orson and Jack. They had broken their partnership bitterly.

"It wasn't so much that he threw a table atme," Jack had told my mother. "But he'd set the tablecloth on firefirst."

That summer, 1956, I had one line inThe Taming of the Shrewand felt I was on my way.

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