//

Interview: Elizabeth Ashley Talks You Can’t Take It With You

Ashley has survived many ups and down, both personal and professional, in a career that’s spanned more than half a century.

You Can’t Take It With You Interview with Elizabeth AshleyGiven Elizabeth Ashley’s propensity for delivering strong, theatrically vibrant performances, one expects her to exude the aura of a grand diva when she’s off the stage. But during my recent interview with the actress, she was nothing short of unpretentious, as well as charming, loquacious, and prone to refreshing displays of self-deprecation. Ashley has survived many ups and down, both personal and professional, in a career that’s spanned more than half a century. She retired twice from what she calls the “acting racket”—once in the early ’60s, just when her career was taking off, to become the wife of movie star George Peppard, and then again in the 1980s to pursue a life of sailing and contemplation. Now 75, Ashley is back, and very much in fine form, in the Broadway revival of the classic George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You from 1936. The play centers around a quirky and unconventional family whose patriarch is played in this production by James Earl Jones. I spoke with Ashley about her cameo in the production and her association with Tennessee Williams, a relationship that began with her acclaimed 1974 performance as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, an experience which she famously described as “like being kissed on the butt by God!”

Tell me about the former Russian countess Olga, your role in You Can’t Take It With You. She arrives in the play at the 11th hour, doesn’t she?

There’s always been that ancient cliché in the theater that the part you wait for is the character that everybody talks about all during the play, but who doesn’t come in until the last 10 or 15 minutes. You get to say wonderful and witty things and then you leave. In terms of workload, it’s terrific! In the movies they call them cameos, and I’ve done a lot of those. But I’ve never had one of those roles on stage before. I always look at a play like looking under the hood of a car—you have to figure out what part of the engine you are. In other words, why did the writers create this character and place it at a certain place in the play, and what is its function. This character has been discussed throughout the play, and you have no idea if she’s actually going to show up. And when she does, it’s sort of the last kind of real lightness—the amusing, witty stuff—before the play delivers, as the Buddhists would say, its letter to the universe. So it’s really good structure.

Did you draw from any specific experiences for this role?

I have to say I was never very grand, but I tried to summon up my distant memories of diva-ness, although I was never good at that. I mean, any actress my age who’s been on the stage for 55 years…I’m in my seventh decade, as the producer reminded me the other day. And that’s kind of a miracle isn’t it, for actresses in this day and age simply to be vertical that long? But one remembers the five minutes in time when you were the hottest twinkie in the culture, when you were on the cover of everything. So I tried to summon that up. But, really, the play says everything else. I mean, she comes in, wearing Jane Greenwood’s terrific costumes; they would have once been her grand clothes, but they’re a little molted and shabby and falling apart now. Historically, it’s interesting: She had obviously gotten out of Russia, like the so-called White Russians, years before the Russian Revolution. I do remember when I came to New York in 1957 there were a lot of doormen and clerks in stores that were all Russian. They all had stories of the better lives that they had lived before the dreaded Bolsheviks came in.

It sounds like you’re having a great time in the part.

Oh, it’s a lot of fun. You know, when you do those huge great roles that I’ve always done, where you’re having to carry the thing, you’re working in a subjective and involved collaboration with the director and the company. The thing that’s wonderful about this is that in rehearsal I get to watch in a purely objective way—and I have always wanted to work with [director] Scott Ellis. The thing that I love about the theater is the labor and machinery of it. I love the mounting of a play. I love load-in. [In this production] there are stagehands whose grandfathers I worked with when I first started. I like the circus aspect of it a whole lot.

And the interesting thing is I did the play in high school. I was never one of those kids that was in, you know, school plays or any of that stuff. I was one of those ballet kids growing up. But in my senior year I was drafted to play the role of Essie, the ballet dancer. I guess it was because I was the only one in my senior high school class who was a dancer, but darling, that was 1957, so I don’t really remember a lot about it! It was the first time I got to plaster a whole lot of eye make-up and I remember that being the most exciting thing about it for me at the time. I did see the 1983 revival that Ellis Rabb directed, where Colleen Dewhurst played the Countess. Colleen had always been one of those actresses who I just hero-worshipped. So when the part was offered to me, I thought, “Oh, this is just great.”

In Actress: Postcards from the Road you write about coming to New York just after high school and the start of your career…

Advertisement

Oh, gosh, you’ve got to understand that that was—people often refer to it as an autobiography, which it never was—simply kind of a memoir. I was like 34 or 35 when I started working on that book and I knew that my life was changing radically and I knew that I would never remember those things that way again. So that’s why I did it. Looking back, it is more like a teenage diary, you know what I mean.

In the first half of your career that you talk about in the book, it seems like you found your greatest fulfilment with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which you first performed in a regional theater, before bringing it to Broadway.

That was one of the great privileges of my so-called career. If you ask what was the one thing that planted the seed of being an actor in my mind, it was when I was 10 or 11 and my mother took me to see a production of Summer and Smoke. I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my mother always took me to all the plays at LSU [Louisiana State University]. We didn’t have any money or anything, but she tried to expose me to as much as she could to ideas and art and things. I remember it was like an epiphany. You could see things on the stage that were going on in your own life, in the emotional and psychological environment that you lived in—the things that nobody ever talked about. As a child, of course, you sense, you’re always haunted by and curious about these things. It was a shock to see people saying and doing these things on stage. That’s when I became interested and then, of course, I read everything I could ever get my hands on by Tennessee. There was a lot in my life that I automatically understood because of a certain kind of Southern family environment, so consequently, when Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was offered to me, I went to Stratford, Connecticut to do it. They gave me $300 a week and a barn to live in, but Tennessee, because his original version had never been done, came to Stratford. He liked it and he just stayed there. So not only did I get to work every day with him, but we became great friends. That was one of the great, great, privileges of my life.

Interestingly enough, I just spent the last two months recording both the abridged and the unabridged versions of a definitive biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr. It’s called Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. He has spent the last 12 years doing the book, and I suspect it’s going to be the great book of the fall. We all know that there are hundreds of books that have been written about Tennessee, and a few of are pretty good, but they generally have some kind of agenda—either the decadent agenda, the genius agenda, the homosexual agenda, you know what I’m saying? But John Lahr, who’s far and away the best writer who has ever written about Tennessee, had access to materials and people that no one ever had access to before, diaries, papers, and letters. The book re-reminded me of who and what Tennessee was, and of the huge influence that he had on me personally, and that he had on all American theater and art.

Looking back at your career, is there something that you still want to do? A dream project?

I tell you, I’m occasionally pretty good at the actual work, right? But I’m the absolute worst at career. I never had a press agent. I wouldn’t know how to network, and I have always been kind of an outsider. I mean, for years I was considered the black sheep, wild child, of the American theater, only because when I should have been hanging out at Sardi’s I was probably on a plane with the Who or something! I have been told that I never had enough ambition career-wise, and that’s not true. I always longed to do certain kinds of art or work with certain kinds of people, but I’m one of those people that couldn’t sell stew to the starving, so God forbid I would try to sell myself. But there’s one play, and I don’t know if I am too old for it, by Dürrenmatt called The Visit. Tragically, all of the translations are terrible, because the language is very stilted. I would like to do that play, update and set it in America, perhaps in the South, because there are aspects of that story, in terms of the way it addresses capitalism on the broad scale and the way it addresses love, lust, and vengeance, that really speak to me. I deeply understand that woman and that relationship in the play. And so for years I’ve had people investigate getting the rights to reset it, but you just can’t get the rights to do it in any way other than the way it is. But, look, I’m a working stiff. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, at that time and place and under those circumstances, whatever they may be!

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.