She Knew What She Wanted

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The producer had said--and the newspaper quoted him: "Romeo and Juliet is not a play for aging prima donnas. Juliet should be played by a girl of 14." Producer Peter Brook was only half-serious about wanting a child-Juliet; he was mostly trying to attract attention to his forthcoming season at Stratford-on-Avon's Memorial Theater. But next morning his phone rang and a breathless voice said: "My name is Claire Bloom. It said in the papers that you wanted a girl of 14 to play Juliet. I am 14!"

Producer Brook asked her to come and see him. He gravely explained to the child --who, nevertheless, looked considerably older than her 14 years--that what he was really after was an experienced actress who might possibly pass for the age of Shakespeare's Juliet.* He now admits: "Little did I realize I was talking to exactly the girl I wanted, but just a few years too early."

The confidence Claire Bloom felt about herself at 14 is now, seven years later, shared by a majority of the critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Even those who did not like Charles Chaplin's self-conscious new film, Limelight, showered Claire, his leading lady, with such adjectives as "poignant," "delightful," "brilliant," "touching," "charming," "perfect." This week in London, Claire is winding up the second month of a triumphant Romeo and Juliet at the historic Old Vic theater. She has been hailed as the most enchanting Juliet in memory.

Single-Minded. Claire Bloom's sad, almost tragic sweetness, which wrings the hearts of her masculine audience and is the envy of more obviously beautiful but less accomplished actresses, was not bestowed on her by a fairy godmother. She worked for it. All she ever wanted to be was a great actress, in the Bernhardt and Duse tradition. She has emptied her life of everything except the theater. While other little girls learned about life by playing, she was learning her trade by working at it. She still works at it--and long past union hours. To improve her carriage, she studies ballet. To improve her speaking voice, she studies singing. To improve her actress' understanding, she reads endlessly, from Euripides to Shaw.

Says Chaplin: "I tested hundreds of girls for Limelight. They were all very pretty, very candy-box, very deadpan, but not what I needed. Claire has distinction, an enormous range, and, underneath her sadness, there is this bubbling humor, so unexpected, so wistful." Claire is a pretty girl, but no beauty: the quality that makes critics and plainer-spoken men yearn over her is charm--a charm to whose single-minded cultivation she has devoted her whole, determined young life. One critic has compared this quality to "the wistful beauty of a lonely blossom of wood sorrel." Of her Juliet, another wrote that she gives "a sweet new agony to the supreme love-drama in the English language." A third tried to describe her as having "the air of being untouched by human hands. She has, quite instinctively, an uncrushable air of absolute innocence."

Offstage, Claire Bloom is only a dim approximation of her real (i.e., her stage) self. She dresses like a teenager, in low heels and wide skirts. She listens intently, and with apparent humility, to anyone who offers her advice. At parties, to which she rarely goes, she acts the wallflower.

Unusual Child. She has always known what she wanted. She was reciting Shakespeare at five. Her mother, who has hovered and brooded over her talented daughter since she was a solemn baby, recalls that Claire would have nothing to do with dolls, that in fact she hated dolls. She didn't much like other children either; she much preferred to learn poetry, in order to recite it.

Claire was born in London in 1931. Her father, Edward Blume, is an advertising man who has spent the last five years in South Africa. Her mother comes from a well-to-do manufacturing family (picture frames). When she divorced her husband in 1950, Mrs. Blume had already changed the spelling of her last name.

As a child, Claire often woke up crying. She was afraid of wasps and of crossing a street. A cousin remembers that Claire "had a thing about being shy. She would ask for the butter in almost a whisper." Before Nazi bombs began raining on London in World War II, nine-year-old Claire and her mother were evacuated --first to the southern coast of England, then to the U.S.

They set up housekeeping in a single room in Forest Hills, just a 20-minute subway ride from Manhattan. It was a hand-to-mouth existence. Mrs. Bloom was ill and, because of British monetary regulations, could get little financial help from England. Claire spent her time singing "terribly sad songs," copying out poems from memory (one of her favorites: Poe's ". . . All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream . . ."), or curled up reading her red-leather volume of Shakespeare. She also went to school, but did badly in such practical subjects as arithmetic. In 1943, Claire and her mother returned to London. Says Claire: "We preferred the blitz."

Poetic-Looking People. By war's end Claire had won a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. After school, she took additional lessons in acting from Eileen Thorndike, sister of Dame Sibyl. That veteran teacher said of her: "It is very rarely that you see a born actress, but I think here was a born actress."

At a Kensington dramatic school she won the cup for the best acting of a first-year student (earlier names on the cup: Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft). She was not exactly popular with her classmates. One of them remembers 14-year-old Claire as "sort of fey--she didn't have her feet on the ground at all. You'd be talking to her and suddenly she'd do a pirouette and you knew she hadn't been listening to you at all. Everything had to be rather beautiful, people had to be poetic-looking. She couldn't stand the noise of anything worldly or vulgar." Nevertheless, the classmate felt bound to add: "Most girls look like puddings at that age. Claire never did." On her 15th birthday Claire got her first job: in a BBC radio play, she played the part of a prostitute.

Poison Speech. Minor roles at the Oxford Playhouse followed. Claire tried out for Webster's The White Devil, which was being put in production by Michael Benthall and Robert Helpmann. Says Benthall: "Suddenly, this little girl appeared and did the poison speech from Romeo and Juliet. She looked enchanting. More important, she had extraordinary technical equipment." The cast was already filled, but Benthall and Helpmann invented a new walk-on part so that they could keep an eye on Claire. When they took over the 1948 Shakespeare season at Stratford-on-Avon, Claire went along.

She was still so young that she had to have the blue ration card issued to children (a source of shame and grief to her), but her Ophelia was excitingly mature. She was given a try for Laurence Olivier's film, Hamlet. She lost the part to Jean Simmons, but Moviemaker J. Arthur Rank was impressed by her, and signed her to a film contract. Her first movie was called The Blind Goddess, a run-of-the-mill picture whose memory still makes Claire wince ("I was a modern ingenue, dancing at the Savoy, that sort of nothing type of thing"). After the picture was made, she asked Rank for a release from her contract, arguing: "I'm not your sort and, frankly, you're no help to me. What's the good of having me against my will?" Rank released her, and Claire played Alizon Eliot in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, then had a successful 18-month run in a bigger part in the season's hit: Fry's version of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon.

Charlie Chaplin first heard of Claire from Playwright Arthur Laurents, who had seen her in the London production of Ring Round the Moon. Chaplin asked for some pictures. When he saw them ("Those dark eyes and everything!"), Chaplin brought her to New York for a screen test. The test turned out badly. Claire returned to England in tears and, for four months, heard nothing. Then came the summons from Hollywood. Chaplin had conned and pondered all the possibilities. Said he: "I never think screen tests prove a bloody thing. We finally decided it had to be Claire."

No Cheesecake. Hollywood and Claire never got beyond nodding acquaintance. Although the ballet close-ups from Limelight show that she has an attractive figure and lovely legs, she refused to pose for cheesecake pictures ("I'm not supposed to be Betty Grable"). She gives her measurements as 5 ft. 3, 112 Ibs. Pressed for further details, she cries in a fury: "What has that to do with acting!"

In Hollywood she seldom strayed more than half a block from her mother's raised eyebrows, and was usually home by 11 o'clock. Hedda Hopper says: "My dear, I didn't see her once all the time she was here!" Columnist Sidney Skolsky reports: "She looked like she was going to take off any moment. You know, walking around in a kind of wonderment." Jerry Epstein, Chaplin's assistant, remembers her as the only actress he ever knew who "could name the character and the play if you read her a quote from Shakespeare."

Long-Term Investment. Claire could obviously get along without Hollywood, but could Hollywood get along without her? So far, both parties seem to feel that the answer is yes. Of the two, however, Hollywood is perhaps the more willing to reconsider. Moviemakers do, after all, need talented actresses, besides pretty faces, clotheshorses and sex-bearers. Such "personality" stars as Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Crawford tend to last longer at the box office than such sexy beauties as Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

The sexy girls win enormous short-term popularity, but for the long financial pull a girl like Claire, who works singlemindedly at her acting, is an excellent bet. Hollywood sex, compared to the earthy realism of such Italian stars as Silvana Mangano and Anna Magnani, is, moreover, a strictly synthetic article. Most of the excitement is generated by the barkers outside the tent--the still photographs used in advertisements. In the stills, a battery of retouch artists sees to it that every line is more lushly beautiful than life, and the cuties can also be exhibited in titillating poses that would never be permitted on the screen. Sometimes the private life of a star is more exciting than her film performances (e.g., Zsa Zsa Gabor is still probably better known as a gossip-column personality than as an actress).

Hollywood, currently in the shivers of a transitional period, is not making full use of such "prestige" stars as Greer Garson, Barbara Stanwyck, Dorothy McGuire and Ginger Rogers. Some of the upcoming stars are specialty comediennes (e.g., Judy Holliday) or musical stars (Leslie Caron, Jane Powell). Even a sexy star like Marilyn Monroe, who heretofore has needed to do nothing but move into camera range, is finding it necessary to learn to sing and dance.

If a Hollywood success is what Claire Bloom really wants, her aloof attitude--and her continuing success on the stage--might be just the way to bring it about. So far, Claire is keeping her distance--and her balance. Though she has made another film since Limelight (the soon-to-be-released Innocents of Paris, with Claude Dauphin), she has turned down two long-term movie contracts. And she has refused an offer to star in a revival of Pinero's Trelawney of the Wells, on the ground that she was not right for the part. She was trying to decide between a part in Graham Greene's new play, Living Room, and a project with Laurence Olivier when Producer Hugh Hunt asked her to play Juliet for the Old Vic, the Shakespearean Olympus of the British actor. Though the Old Vic was in danger of losing its Arts Council subsidy because of a succession of failures, Claire jumped at the chance. She can take most of the credit for giving the Old Vic its first moneymaking hit in years.

Small Cafe. In London, as in Hollywood, no one can quite figure the girl out. One friend, Critic Ken Tynan, says that every time Claire has worked in a play, "all the women have mothered her and all the leading men have tried to make her." But anyone who tries to get too close finds Claire elusive. Her chief social activity is going home to mother. The Blooms live in a tiny three-room flat. The largest bedroom is Claire's, and a smaller one is reserved for her 18-year-old brother John when he is on vacation from Westminster School. Her mother sleeps on a daybed in the living room. Claire seldom has dates.

Claire's fame has far outstripped her fortune. She made around $200 a week as Chaplin's leading lady, and gets only $125 a week from the Old Vic. Like most Londoners, she queues up to take the bus to her job, eats in a small cafe across the street from the Old Vic, and is rarely seen in the Caprice or other flossy restaurants. In her free time she goes to the theater or the ballet, and is reading her way through Dostoevsky, George Moore, the Brontes and Jane Austen. She likes to forage among the stalls of the Caledonian Market for inexpensive antiques, which she gives away for Christmas presents. She also likes to shop for clothes. "I don't buy any. I just look at them. I'm the shopgirl's despair."

Beyond next spring, when the Old Vic season ends, Claire has no plans. She may do another movie--if she likes the part. But her heart and eye are steadfast on her first and only love: the theater. Says she: "I couldn't bear to be just a film star. I'm much too ambitious for that."

Like all female parts in the Elizabethan theater, invariably played by teen-age boys.

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