Marian Seldes at home in New York City
The Wonderful Journey of Marian Seldes
By Jerry Tallmer
On Thursday evening, August 18, 2005, five days before her 77th birthday, Marian Seldes in the role of Annabelle Willard made her entrance down an aisle of a theater on East 59th Street, saying to the actor who portrayed her driver, aide, and morphine supplier: “Gently, gently. You’re a sadist, Edward.”
Whether the name Edward was and is a tribute or not to a certain Edward Albee is something only Terrence McNally knows.
The drama before us was McNally’s Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams. It was by rough (Internet) count the birthday girl’s 50th or 60th on-stage opening night in New York City alone, along with God knows how many outside that city, or on television, or in films. Remember, this is the actress who for four years, from 1978 until late 1982, appeared in Deathtrap on Broadway without missing one single performance; who between 1974 and 1982 appeared in 179 episodes of “CBS Radio Mystery Theater.”
A few weeks before that 77th birthday, Marian Seldes, in the living room of her apartment overlooking Central Park, said:
“I was told by many people when I was very young – by friends of my parents, for instance – that the last part of my life would be the most interesting. I think they told me that because, though I had an incredible childhood, I was so grown up even then.
“The comment never bothered me, and it turned out to be true. It is the best part of my life,” said the tall, willowy five-time Tony nominee, multiple Obie Award nominee, winner of one Tony, of a couple of Obies, a Drama Desk Award, all sorts of other encomiums, and about as gracious, generous, forward-looking, joyously dedicated an individual as ever worked in her profession.
“I know in films it gets difficult as people get older, but in my good fortune, it gets better. Professionally, everything. And certainly that’s true of this part now” – Annabelle Willard in the McNally – “a lonely, wealthy, irascible woman who’s dying, and who has something, a wonderful old theater, that two other people want.”
The parents of Marian Seldes’s loving childhood were Gilbert Seldes — journalist, critic, author of The Seven Lively Arts, a seminal 1924 book that raised comic strips, jazz, movies, broadcasting, etc., onto the map of culture — and Alice Hall Seldes of the Episcopalian blue-blooded Halls, Alice’s stockbroker brother Richard had, in his white Naval uniform, been the first husband of much-married Dorothy (Dolly) Schiff, subsequent owner and publisher of the New York Post and, as “Mrs. Schiff,” queen bee of the New York newspaper scene – but always just “Aunt Dorothy” to Marian herself.
“My parents met at [poet] John Peale Bishop’s wedding. My mother had gone to school at Brearley with Margaret, the girl Bishop married. When my parents in turn got married, my grandmother was surprised” – delicate Marian Seldes locution – “because my father was Jewish. Then of course he became her favorite member of the whole family.
“Something that haunts me,” she said, “is that my father was 77 when he died [in 1969], and now” – this was some months ago – “I’m 76. My mother died at 55. You pass these milestones. So shocking to think of lives cut short. Whereas my Uncle George” – irreconcilably ultra-radical writer/publisher George Seldes – “lived to be 105. But he took better care of himself than my father did.”
What were your father’s sins?
“Oh, smoking, drinking, not exercising – all the things people now insist you do or not do. My father exercised his brain,” she said. With her nice grave smile: “I do floor exercises, because I have a bad back. But the theater is what makes me stay well – or should I say, makes me stay in condition.”
(The writer of this article is beginning to think that it’s starting to sound like a woman’s-magazine puff piece. On the other hand, the writer of this article has known and cherished Marian Seldes for upwards of 40 years now; knew her father before her, and liked him a lot; had a speaking and interviewing relationship with her late husband Garson Kanin, as well as with Ruth Gordon who preceded Marian as Mrs. Garson Kanin and was one of Marian’s lifelong heroines. This apartment in which we were now sitting and talking had in fact been Garson and Ruth’s before it was Garson and Marian’s. So if that gets anybody off the hook, so be it; and if it doesn’t, so be it likewise.)
“The apartment in which I grew up was at 125 East 57th Street. Forty years I lived there. One Christmas in the late ’60s or early ’70s they tore the building down and put up a hideousness in its place. Look,” said Marian Seldes, crossing the room and bringing back, in one hand, an ordinary red brick. “My daughter gave me this, salvaged from our old building.
“Well, because my father was a theater critic, he took my brother and me to plays all the time. And one of them was The Three Sisters.”
That was the 1942 production of the Chekhov masterpiece produced by and starring Katharine Cornell (as Masha) and directed by Miss Cornell’s husband Guthrie McClintic.
“I thought she was wonderful, and when I graduated from the Dalton School I did not want to go to college but to be in theater, be an actress. Two people recommended me. The first one was Robert Edmond Jones” – the great producer, director, writer, set and lighting designer – “who was a friend of my parents, and whose book The Dramatic Imagination is still the best there is. And the other was Guthrie McClintic, because my father had written a profile of Katharine Cornell for The New Yorker.”
She put the brick back in place.
“My daughter [by Marian’s first husband, the late TV producer/writer Julian Clayman] is named Katharine – yes, Katharine Hepburn had the same spelling, Katharine with an ‘a,’ for the same reason – and my daughter’s middle son, the 16-year-old, is named Guthrie, so you can see the importance of that family to this one.
“Being a grandmother is also sheer bliss. My grandchildren are 14, 16, and 19 – all boys. Another wonderful thing abut being older is that it gives you distance. It makes you appreciate your parents more. My daughter picked up a picture, here, last night, and just looked at it, for a very long time. It shows me and my mother on the Atlantic City boardwalk.” She brought the photo over – two lovely females – for me to look at.
At just that instant, the phone rang. She went to answer it, listened, spoke, laughed, hung up, came back and said: “That was John Guare. I told him you were interviewing me. He said: ‘Tell him that playwrights are throwing themselves at your feet.’ ”
The voice, intelligence, acculturation, and know-how of Marian Seldes were never put to better use than on the soundtrack of Ballets Russes, an engrossing documentary film by the husband/wife team of Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine about the great ballerinas, danceurs, choreographers, and impresarios of an age gone by.
After three years of research, interviewing, and camera work on both sides of the Atlantic, there came what Ms. Goldfine describes as “the long process of teasing out the story” in a narration that went beyond the academic, the clinical. “What we had in mind was the voice of an older woman – well, let’s just say a woman – telling a fairy tale.”
They found that woman, that voice, in the course of watching another lovely documentary, Rick McKay’s Broadway: The Golden Years. “What we didn’t then know was that [a very young] Marian had gone to the School of the American Ballet, had danced with some of the people in our film, had in fact made her first professional appearance anywhere not as an actress but in a 1942 Ballet Theater tribute to Michel Fokine.”
Marian’s first bit part in theater was as “Attendant to Medea” in the 1947 Robert Whitehead production of the Euripedes tragedy starring Judith Anderson, Florence Reed, and John Gielgud, directed by Sir John. Well, he wasn’t Sir John yet. There followed a small part in the 1949 road and Broadway McClintic-Cornell production of That Lady, a Kate O’Brien saga about Phillip II of Spain and his cupcake.
After that, as they say, Marian Seldes never – well, seldom – looked back.
In 1964 director Gielgud put her into his production of Edward Albee’s cryptic Tiny Alice, and in 1966 she won her Tony for her performance in Alan Schneider’s staging of Albee’s far less cryptic A Delicate Balance. Twenty-eight years later she would – “in my 60s” – give one of her most compelling, most brilliant performances as the middle figure, the one merely called “B,” in Albee’s play about his mother, Three Tall Women, at the Promenade Theater, Broadway and 76th Street. Six years after that she would turn delicious (if menacing) comedienne opposite Brian Murray in Albee’s The Play About the Baby at the Century Center down on East 15th Street. She’s since been in a Beckett/Albee double-bill called Counting the Ways, and recently did a reading with Albee of Occupant, his play about the flamboyant sculptress Louise Nevelson.
“Edward and I are born the same year, you know” – 1928.
Way back in the Guthrie McClintic production of The Three Sisters that Gilbert Seldes took daughter Marian and son Timothy Seldes to in 1942, the role of Natalya Ivanova, the tough, grasping young sister-in-law, was played by a Ruth Gordon then in her mid-40s. Fourteen-year-old Marian Seldes would never forget that performance. “The greatest I’ve ever seen, and Walter Kerr said the same thing many years later.”
Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin’s partner both as wife and playwright over the decades, died on Martha’s Vineyard in 1985.
“And Garson came back to New York after doing all the things you have to do, and we spoke, and I went over to have dinner with him, and I never went home. When I came to stay with him I was 56. I was shattered by Ruth’s death. I’d heard them talk about wills and things, you know, but …
“They were married 40 years. No, I was never in anything with her. I wish I had been. Garson? I’d known Garson my whole life. There’s a book of his I’ve always loved, It Takes a Long Time to Become Young [Doubleday, 1978]. It’s interesting, too, about age: Ruth was 16 years older than he was. I was 16 years younger than he was.”
Marian, have you ever been out of work? You seem to have been in one show or another every day of your life.
She smiled, dug out a piece of paper on which she’d made some notes, then said: “This is the longest time ever, between doing this McNally play at the Williamstown [Mass.] Theater Festival last summer, and doing it now. But you know, I jotted down some of the things that have happened in a year.”
Glancing at the paper in hand:
“I taught at Fordham.” [From 1967 to 1991 she’d taught at Juilliard.] “I did five [lunchtime shows] at Food for Thought. Was in six readings of plays, three at Lincoln Center, three at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club]. I did Occupant, and I think Edward and I are going to do it again sometime. I did Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat with the Philharmonic, and m-c’d Lovely to Look At, a musical, at the Museum of the City of New York. And did some benefits. You can’t do any of that if you’re in a play.
“Talking of old age, after we finish here, I’m on my way to sign my will.”
When Ruth Gordon won an Academy Award for her performance as the corny, ominous Dakota-dwelling matron of Roman Polansky’s Rosemary’s Baby, she stood there, Oscar in hand, and said to the Hollywood satraps and the watching millions around the world: “I can’t tell you how encouragin’ a thing this is.” Dropping the ‘n,’ à la her native Massachusetts, was the masterstroke. She was then 72.
One of the final statements of Anabelle Willard, the fierce old lady played by Marian Seldes in Terrence McNally’s Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, is as follows:
“It all comes home to roost, n’est-çe pas? I never liked people who said n’est-çe pas. I thought it was affected, and now I say it all the time. God, what a terrible journey this is.”
Don’t you believe it.
