Out of the Mold

Some actresses sit and brood inwardly for hours when they are getting ready for a performance. Geraldine Page, on the other hand, sometimes screams "Help! Help!" at the rafters. No one comes running. Everyone knows that she is merely trying to bring her high voice down to a broader tone, and moreover, that this is one girl who needs no help.

The question is no longer how good she is, but how great she is. For ten years her stature as an actress has been rising, quite without flash or spectacle, but with a steadiness that has brought her by now to the highest level of her profession. The most recent evidence was her 4 1/2-hour performance in the Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, which closed a successful run last week. In it, she stood out against the fading background of a dated play, skillfully aging from a neurotic 20-year-old through a ripe and experimental maturity into a waspish old age surrounded by three men she has caught and caged.

She is a theater actress all the way; yet her history with Hollywood has been curious. Time after time, Hollywood has offered other actresses with box-office names roles that Geraldine Page has eventually been given by default--Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth--and each time Page has won an Oscar nomination. Doing films as a kind of part-time moonlighter, she has become a movie star in spite of herself.

Motive Within. She is an osteopath's daughter from Kirksville, Mo., who was raised in Chicago and did her first play with a Methodist church group. "I'm going to do this for the rest of my life," she decided, and enrolled at Chicago's Goodman Memorial Theater School of Drama. When she graduated, she formed a summer stock company, which she and several schoolmates kept running for a remarkable four years. She taught drama one year at De Paul University and worked with a rep group called the Valentine Traveling Players, building for herself a versatility that all too few American actresses ever achieve. She was all over off-Broadway for several seasons, playing maids and grandmothers ("I'm a great grandmother," she says ambivalently). Since she was a reedy 5 ft. 8 in. tall, she had to start as a crone if she had any hope of becoming an ingenue. She did anything at all, including a production of The Thirteenth God in which the 13 gods onstage regularly outnumbered the audience. Meanwhile, she checked hats at Lindy's, Leon & Eddie's, the Vanderbilt Hotel, the Old Rumanian Restaurant and Luchow's.

Most important, she became a student of Uta Hagen's and later a member of the Actors Studio, soaking up the Method, which requires that each character should be built motive by motive from the inside. She became the Studio's virtual salutatorian. She could fidget, whine and hesitate like no other actress before her. Her pauses were unmatched. When she played the spinsterish heroine in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke, she made an off-Broadway hit out of a Broadway flop, but she also kept the audience in their seats till after midnight. Director Jose Quintero, taking a second look, cut 20 minutes out of the running time by merely giving her a fatherly talk.

The Barracuda Side. Summer and Smoke put her into something of a mold, and people anxious to keep her there liked to say that she was a splendid weeping willow but not much else. No one said that any more after they saw her in Separate Tables, playing both a repressed spinster and a glamorous high-fashion model. In Sweet Bird of Youth, she was a supremely fading beauty, the sharded Hollywood sexpot with her heart on her thigh. Her manner and expression are so mobile, in fact, that it is possible to see four pictures of her in four different roles and not know it is the same woman. Even though she will feign annoyance with movie directors for "shooting me from my barracuda side," she seems to have no real vanity about her appearance, willingly adopting whatever face best fits a role. But she admits that she "en joyed being glamorous" in Sweet Bird of Youth, and in the early acts of Strange Interlude she quite unnecessarily wears a chin strap, presumably to youthen herself.

Now 38, she is a twice-married divorcee with a strong but as yet impermanent connection with Actor Rip Torn, who played her lover in Strange Interlude. She lives in a Greenwich Village apartment and works all week long at the Studio, taking on a heavy schedule of classwork on top of the 27 hours a week she spends onstage.

In a field where professional jealousy is a factor of economic life, Geraldine Page is admired even more extravagantly by actors than by audiences, who only know what they see and that they have been moved, and seldom wonder how it was done. Even her fellow pros find it hard to explain. When pressed, one actor fumbled, made several tries, then suggested: "Gerry is never ahead. She is always reacting as if she did not know what the other actor was going to say." It may not be real life, but no illusionist can come closer than that.

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