Hail, Poetry

By John Skow

Linda Ronstadt & Co. put Pirates of Penzance on film

"Moviemaking is like working in a factory gluing fenders on cars. Three minutes and stop, three minutes and stop. I said I wouldn't do it if they paid me, so they didn't pay me and I did it. I haven't talked to anyone who wasn't wearing a costume in a month and a half. "

--Linda Ronstadt

Linda, ever so slightly bored out of her mind, has gone stale in London toward the end of filming her first and maybe her last movie, Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. She knows it and she is sorry, because she loves Pirates, and Papp, and Director Wilfred Leach, and Cast Members Rex Smith (the seraphically stupid hero Frederic), Kevin Kline (the pirate king), George Rose (the major general), Angela Lansbury (the nursemaid Ruth) and Tony Azito (the double-jointed police sergeant).

Except for Lansbury, who joined the company for the movie, they have all been together since Papp had the idea a couple of years ago that Pirates might make a few weeks of fun in the summer of 1980 for Central Park's outdoor theater. Their mutual loyalty is so strong that the five principals--Azito's role is smaller--agreed to an almost unheard-of pay scheme by which each of them took an equal and relatively small salary so that Papp could afford to make the film (hence Ronstadt's remark about acting without being paid). Papp, for his part, is proud of keeping his congenial family together, and of fighting off Hollywood offers--for instance, to finance Pirates if he cast John Travolta as the pirate king instead of Kline.

All true, and true also that Ronstadt, 35, was both enthusiastic and jealously protective of her stage role as Mabel, the prettiest and cleverest of the major general's eight wonky daughters. "I would have died before I let my understudy take over onstage," she says. "Not that I begrudged her a chance to shine before an audience, but it was my part." Now she is preserving it against the fender-gluing tedium of film making, with its rhythm of endless delays. Between takes on the set, she hikes her white Victorian hobble skirt up to her knees so that she can sit down in it, finds her place in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, and until a hand appears between page and eyes--a makeup woman minutely improving Mabel's face--she reads subtle paragraphs about Americans abroad. But it is now harder for her to find the intensity that the stage show always seemed to generate, and Director Leach has noticed that lately she seems to grit her teeth when thinking of England. Love scenes with Rex Smith are still to be shot, and she must be shyly radiant. Leach has told her to take some time off, fly back to her home in Los Angeles and soak up those shy, radiant freeway vitamins.

With a day off in London and freedom on the horizon, she is cheerful. She has worked out for an hour on the weight machines at a health club, eaten a hamburger and bowl of chili at a Park Lane beanery that Californians consider reliable because dreaded steak-and-kidney pie does not appear on the menu, and rummaged successfully in a bookstore for the three volumes of the Bodley Head edition of Henry James that she did not yet own: The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, and What Maisie Knew. Now she warms her toes, bare and red-nailed, before a coal fire in her hotel suite and considers the personality of Mabel: "Basically earnest, curious and innocent, and no dummy; she's smarter than you think. It's a facet of my own personality, not one I wear every day, but it felt authentic. When I walked onstage, Mabel would do things."

Some critics found Ronstadt's acting to be wanting. But they found it; it was there. An observer notes, incidentally, that she does not have pigeon toes in the offstage world. In Pirates, her little white toes gaze bashfully at each other as they stick out of the bottom of her long white dress, and strong men fall in love. It is clear, however, that this croquet player's stance, denoting naivete and endearing awkwardness, is characterization and not malformation.

Most of the early reviews marveled that Ronstadt, a rock-'n'-roll belter, could hit the high notes so neatly and sweetly. Her astonishing soprano seemed to float upward without effort past the last row of seats. Pirates Adapter and Conductor William Elliott had offered to recast her songs in a lower key. In fact, he says now, she sings optional notes he wrote that are higher than the ones Composer Sir Arthur

Sullivan called for. Ronstadt says she learned this high range--"a heady little boy's soprano, not connected to the rest of me"--by imitating her older brother when they were both children. She didn't know she still possessed it until one day, while driving down Sunset Boulevard, she started singing along with a Puccini opera on the radio. "I realized that I could blast out these sounds, and I drove to a phone and called my friend John Rockwell" (a New York Times music critic) and said, 'Listen to what I can do, squawk, squawk, squawk.' "

Her vocal problem was in her insecure midrange, between her boy soprano high notes and her solid rock-'n'-roll chest tones. Nine months of operatic training helped by letting her shift into the high extension at a lower pitch. But when she made a rock-'n'-roll tour of Japan after leaving the Pirates company on Broadway, she found that she had lost some of her chest tones: "I couldn't belt as hard."

Talk with any member of the Pirates company, and what you are likely to hear is a succession of admiring stories about other members of the cast. Basic Pirates lore, told from different viewpoints, is an account of the night on Broadway when the pit band came in drunk from a Christmas party and couldn't toot together or on key. Ronstadt, making her first entrance, a point at which she must sing Poor Wandering One in a way that tells everyone who's boss, heard their clamor and got the giggles. She couldn't stop. Rex Smith, on-stage with her, felt himself begin to laugh--a realization, this open-faced, 26-year-old rock singer recalls, that is not at all pleasant, but rather like that of a mountain climber who feels himself beginning to slide.

Linda broke up totally, and Smith was almost as far out of control. The first act was a horror, and by the end of it the audience was booing. Linda, giggling and crying backstage, told Director Leach she couldn't continue. He said, very calmly, that she must go out in front of the curtain, before the second act began, apologize to the audience and sing Poor Wandering One again. She did, with Smith beside her, and the night was saved. Leach tells this as a tribute to Ronstadt and Smith. Ronstadt says that Leach is wise and solid, and that Smith, who hadn't caused the problem, had with characteristic generosity shared the blame. And Smith is awed that Ronstadt pulled herself together, and that her apology did not mention the miscreant musicians.

Next day, on a sound stage got up to resemble a pirate cove on the coast of a Cornwall that never was, Ronstadt is dead on her feet. She leans her head on Smith's shoulder between takes. All the pirates are on hand, and so are the major general's daughters. George Rose, the major general, a veteran Shakespearean actor trained at the Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare Theater, is never out of character and never needs a retake. Kevin Kline, the pirate king, has a fencing shirt with a decolletage that makes matrons of good reputation go googly.

The company has been trying for several hours to shoot a scene featuring the song Hail, Poetry ("For what, we ask, is life/ Without a touch of poetry in it?"). Director Leach sees the scene as a tableau, a Victorian postcard. He has shot it before, but the results seemed to him "like a bunch of people standing in a field." Shooting it again is costing money, and Universal Pictures has begun prodding Papp about costs; the production, which is scheduled for release later this year, was budgeted at $9 million and now seems likely to come in at about $10 million. But Papp and Leach, neither of whom has made a film before, are confident that they like what they have done, and they are not about to take any guff from a film studio. Papp has told Leach to reshoot and get it right.

Leach has brought in a costly and flexible French camera crane to do the overhead shot. The Hail, Poetry music, like the rest of the score, was recorded months before in New York City, and is now played over a loudspeaker so the performers can mouth it for the camera. Wind machines agitate cellophane water. Three grips with white mechanical seagulls dangling from fish poles manipulate their birds. Kline leads the singing handsomely and athletically. His pirate king is a sunstruck Errol Flynn who expresses consternation, delight and perplexity in the same way, by bouncing into a fencer's lunge, and frequently by stabbing himself in the foot. He is splendid, and he had better be, because in two hours he has to be on an airplane. The following day, in New York, he begins filming Director Alan Pakula's Sophie's Choice, in which he plays opposite Meryl Streep.

The scene works. Everyone rushes to an adjoining sound stage for one last shot in which Kline must appear. There are 90 minutes left. Leach gets the shot he needs in 91 1/2. Rex Smith jumps up on a statue of Queen Victoria and yells, "Hurrah for the pirate king!" Everyone kisses Kline, or whacks him on the back, or both. He disappears. Papp breaks out champagne. Ronstadt vanishes to work out again on the weight machines at her health club.

After she returns from Los Angeles and finishes Pirates, she has said, she has an album that is overdue. Standards, she says: Ghost of a Chance and I've Got a Crush on You. Melodic, structured for a singer. "See, rock 'n' roll is structured for guitar players, and the singing line is secondary." Smith wants to play Laertes if Joe Papp stages Hamlet. Leach will direct a London stage company in Pirates, and then he and Papp want to do more films, "maybe one a year." And George Rose and Police Sergeant Tony Azito will return to the Broadway company of Pirates, which is still going strong. Azito, a funny, narrow man of 6 ft. 3 in.--that's 6 ft. tall and 3 in. wide--answers the obvious question: "You don't get tired of acting in a hit."

--By John Skow

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