"I Go Back to Methuselah!"

By Gerald Clarke

It is a bright, blustery afternoon in early April, and 15 stories below, tugs and barges are plowing through the wind-whipped water of the East River. But in the living room of his Manhattan apartment, Rex Harrison is enjoying spring: masses of Michaelmas daisies and tulips, great pots of begonias and African lilies, and islands of pink-and-white quince. He has just returned from a rehearsal, and, as he sits down to talk about a career that spans six decades, he admits to being tired. The play, Frederick Lonsdale's Aren't We All?, was a sellout in London last year; it opens on Broadway at the end of the month, and Harrison has been practicing with an almost entirely new cast. The only one remaining from the London production, indeed, is his co-star and partner in charm, Claudette Colbert.

One of the most popular English playwrights of the '20s, Lonsdale was a master of drawing-room comedy, sophisticated plays about the idle, but not idle-tongued, rich. "In the '50s and '60s, when the angry young men were writing, people thought Freddy's plays were absolute rubbish," says Harrison. "But the angries have grown old and got their goodies, and they don't know what to be angry about any more. So there's going to be a revival of Lonsdale, I think. The plot of Aren't We All? is not terribly strong, but the play itself is really rather nice. Freddy's plays are much less mannered than Noel Coward's, and I find them easier to play. Coward wrote the way he talked, which was staccato and ripple. Freddy's writing is more gentle. In London, audiences adored it."

Or, perhaps more precisely, they adored Harrison and Colbert, who, at 77 and 81, may be the world's most accomplished practitioners of the all-but-lost art of amusing repartee and witty exit lines. Their last Broadway romp was The $ Kingfisher in 1978. "I go back to the age of Methuselah!" says Harrison, with what sounds like genuine pride. "When I first went to London to work in the '20s, I loved watching the great high-comedy actors of the period, like Gerald du Maurier. To my mind, they were the epitome of what acting is about."

Born near Liverpool into an upper-middle-class family, Harrison started acting professionally when he was only 16. "Those were the days when people said that only fish and actors travel on Sundays, and I toured for ten solid years. Nobody saw me, and I was bloody awful. But at least I learned my craft." People, meaning London critics and producers, began seeing him on the West End in 1931. By the beginning of World War II he had established a reputation in Britain and was able to sleep late on Sundays, just like any other English gentleman.

After serving as a ground officer in the R.A.F. during the war, he became a transatlantic traveler. He made a series of decent but mostly unmemorable Hollywood pictures, including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Unfaithfully Yours, and appeared occasionally on Broadway; in 1949 he won a Tony for his performance as King Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days. Then, in 1956, he was given what every actor dreams about, the part he was born to play. For Harrison that role was Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, the musical version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Suddenly the whole world was listening to his remarkable voice, as ruby-rich as vintage claret, chanting, "Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! I've grown accustomed to her face." Higgins won him another Tony, and an Oscar as well for the 1964 movie. Says he: "It was a marvelous show to do. I could have played Higgins for 20 years, but I wanted to go to do other things. And I did in fact."

Unlike his celebrated contemporaries Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, Harrison has never enjoyed playing Shakespeare or speaking Elizabethan blank verse--"Tudor" verse, as he calls it. His preference has always been Shaw, and he has acted in many of Shaw's plays, including Heartbreak House, which he did on Broadway in 1983 and '84, and filmed for the Showtime pay-cable channel. "It is of course a terrible shame in the eyes of the English theater that I haven't played Shakespeare," he says. "But perfect prose is my ideal for acting, and I think Shaw wrote pretty perfect prose."

Harrison has firm, even stern, ideas about his craft. The actors he admires most are those who adhere to his standards, like Richardson and Alec Guinness. "Richardson was a dazzlingly strange actor, and Guinness's acting is very far back, which I like. He's not forced in any way. The only thing in acting is the truth; you have to be truthful to the situation, whether it's comedy or drama, whether you're in a three-ring circus or slitting your throat. If you go beyond truth, if what you are doing becomes unreal, you get into ham very quickly. I'll explain what I mean with an anecdote. There was a French actor who was famous for his Cyrano de Bergerac. One day he allowed himself the luxury of a tear: he made himself cry instead of the audience. Afterwards, he called the whole company on stage and apologized publicly. The point is that we have to move an audience, not ourselves."

In Hollywood, Harrison learned to appreciate the abilities of some of his American colleagues. Spencer Tracy heads his list, followed, surprisingly enough, by Gary Cooper. "Tracy had a unique talent," he says. "He was a great screen actor who could turn an audience on very quickly through truth. But Cooper was marvelously good. Film is a visual art, and screen audiences don't hear the words as they do in the theater. Cooper had learned early on not to bother with dialogue. He used to go through his scripts and cut out all long speeches. He was good at looking, thinking and listening. Today I think Robert Redford is rather good; he is so obviously natural, very handsome, easy and truthful."

Though he is almost always busy on stage, Harrison is seldom seen on screen any more. "The only scripts I've been sent," he says sadly, "have been so highly pornographic--highly pornographic!--that I'd like to see the films but not be in them. The producers of one said, 'Well, if you don't want to do it, leave the script with your porter and we'll pick it up.' I said, 'I can't leave this with the porter. He might read it!' "

These days he divides his time between the U.S. and Europe, and when Aren't We All? ends its run this summer, he and his sixth wife, Mercia, will begin looking for a flat in London. "You have to be young and agile to live in New York," he says. "When you get to my age, London is a bit better paced." The daughter of an English rubber planter, Mercia was born in Singapore. It was she who decorated their Manhattan apartment and turned what was once a dining room into a studio where Rex can paint the bright landscapes he loves so much. And it was she who planted the living room garden that has turned chilly April into warm May.

Has he thought of retiring? Harrison pulls himself up, tired no more. Would Henry Higgins drop an h? Not bloody likely. "Acting is my profession," he says. "I love audiences! I glory in the stage! And, fortunately, there are a lot of parts written for old gentlemen."