Claudette: 77 and Ageless

By Gerald Clarke

"She's been drinking from the Fountain of Youth, that girl"

It had been a bad couple of days for Claudette Colbert, and even this most unactressy of actresses was suffering an attack of nerves. On the morning of the day her new play, a suspense comedy titled A Talent for Murder, opened in Washington, D.C., the fire alarms rang in her hotel and everyone was ordered to flee the building. She scurried around, picking up valuables and trying to coax Bijou, the cat, from under the bed. By the time Bijou was out, the gongs were silent --false alarm--but the damage was done. "I was shaking for 20 minutes," she explained later.

That night, just before she went onstage at the Kennedy Center, she whispered a little prayer: "Man Dieu, aidez moi." Born in Paris, Colbert likes to speak to God directly--in his native tongue. But nothing worked that day. Her timing, perfect the night before, was off ever so slightly, and she even fluffed a couple of lines. Getting up early the next morning to read the Washington Post, she was stunned by a savage review, and almost immediately began throwing up. "Have you seen the newspaper?" she asked an interviewer that afternoon. "Is it true? Tell me frankly." After more than 60 pictures and several Broadway hits, it is touching, and rather nice, that Colbert still needs reassurance. Here it is: the play needs some rewriting before it opens on Broadway Oct. 1, but she was, as usual, terrific.

Colbert, who will turn 78 next week, has been terrific so long that she may be the only one who remembers when, or if, she was not. Perhaps in her only silent picture, For the Love of Mike. "I had no idea what I was doing, and I should never have played in silent pictures anyway. I wanted to talk!" And talk she did, in that voice of brushed velvet, through such films as Cleopatra, Midnight, The Palm Beach Story, Since You Went Away, Three Came Home and It Happened One Night, for which she won the 1934 Academy Award as best actress.

Though she has proved several times that she is a fine dramatic actress, her specialty is sophisticated comedy. Her heroines are two older, now retired practitioners of the art, Ina Claire and Lynn Fontanne. "I love to play comedy," she says, "and I can say immodestly that I'm a very good comedienne. But I was always fighting that image too. I just never had the luck to play bitches. Those are the only parts that ever register really." Two bitches she almost played were Blanche du Bois in the Broadway version of A Streetcar Named Desire and Margo Channing in All About Eve. But movie contracts kept her from the first part and a skiing accident from the second, which went to Bette Davis. In A Talent for Murder, Colbert is playing for fun once again, as a witty but alcoholic writer of mysteries whose avaricious family is trying 10 put her away so that they can enjoy her fortune. One of them is killed and the question of course is: Whodunit?

Part of the play's problem is that Authors Norman Panama and Jerome Chodorov cannot make up their own minds. The identity of the killer has been changed three times, requiring extensive rewriting and relearning of lines. Beyond that, Colbert is supposed to be crippled and must navigate the stage in an electric wheelchair; but the obstreperous machine just won't work right. "I'm black-and-blue from that damned thing," she complains.

By the time the "damned thing" arrives on Broadway, it is safe to say that it will have met its mistress. "Tough dame, that lovely frog," said Frank Capra, who directed her in It Happened One Night. When she sets her mind to do something, Colbert does it. Period. "I don't have any patience with people who say I can't.' " she says. "You can do anything you want to do if you try."

That determination doubtless came from her mother and grandmother. Father, a minor bank functionary who brought the family to the U.S. in 1906, when Colbert was three, was overshadowed by those two feuding, formidable little women. Colbert's favorite was grandmere. "There's an old saying," she says: "Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy--the mother."

In 1923, two years after she graduated from Manhattan's Washington Irving High School, luck got her a bit part in a Broadway play and talent soon made her a star, first in the theater, then in films. She married and divorced an actor, then in 1935 married a Los Angeles surgeon, Joel Pressman. His death, of liver cancer in 1968, left her devastated. "He was my best friend," she says. "I had been hemmed in all my life, thinking that if I wanted to go somewhere, I couldn't. All of a sudden I was completely alone--my mother and my brother died not long after--and I could go anywhere. And it was awful."

She now lives half the year in Barbados, where she owns a house, and there she is almost as famous a hostess as she is an actress. "Her house is exquisitely decorated," says Jean-Pierre Aumont, her co-star in A Talent for Murder. "She has fantastic taste. Her table is set as if it's at the White House --which is funny because you eat wearing bathing suits." She has an apartment on Fifth Avenue as well and, now that she is by herself, also indulges one of her passions: travel. Hollywood? "The whole thing is over for me there. My husband is gone, my home is gone, and my picture career is gone."

Colbert loves acting, though it was never an obsession for her, as it was for some of her contemporaries, like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. "I never thought of my career as the primary thing in my life," she says. "I looked upon acting as a job, and now, frankly, I regret it. I think of all the things I could have done. I just let parts come to me. I never went after them." Still, that seems to be about all she regrets, and if Colbert, radiant and ageless, is not happy, who is? "She's been drinking from the Fountain of Youth, that girl," marveled one elderly gent on opening night. Could be. Reminded that one of her idols, Lynn Fontanne, is now past 90, Colbert beams and says: "I'm going to do that." --By Gerald Clarke

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