Alec Guinness Takes Off His Masks

By Gerald Clarke

"I'm a great gossip. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying." Alec Guinness, relaxing over lunch in Manhattan, is engaging in his favorite hobby: teasing. In fact, he is a great gossip, and it is impossible not to pay attention to what he says. During the past half-century or so, he has played dozens of memorable roles: a Prime Minister (Disraeli), a Pope (Innocent III), a King (Charles I), a prince (Arabia's Faisal), a fanatical colonel (Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai), a mad dictator (Hitler), a Jedi knight (Obi-wan Kenobi) and a spymaster (George Smiley in TV adaptations of John le Carre's espionage sagas). Now, at 71, he has added another role to that impressive list: author of one of the best show-business memoirs of recent years, a witty, wise and consistently entertaining account of life under the greasepaint.

Blessings in Disguise is Sir Alec's title, but the blessings in this all- too-short autobiography (Knopf; $17.95) wear no masks. Along with an engaging picture of Guinness himself, there are candid and almost always hilarious portraits of some of those he has met along the way to his threescore and eleven: George Bernard Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie, Edith Evans, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and even Ernie Kovacs, who, he says, was "just about the funniest man I have ever met."

One afternoon during the filming of Our Man in Havana, in which Kovacs played a corrupt police chief, Sir Alec passed the comedian's hotel room. The door was open, and Kovacs was sitting at a desk and typing furiously, surrounded by half a dozen naked girls reading magazines. "Shall I shut your door?" Guinness politely suggested. "No! For heaven's sakes!" replied Kovacs. "What would people say? They'd say Kovacs is in that room with a | bunch of naked broads. And they'd think the worst. With the door open they can see for themselves it's all perfectly innocent."

Although the knighthood was granted in 1959, Guinness does not consider himself on the same level as England's great aristocrats of the theater: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and the late Ralph Richardson. "I'm just not," he says. "It's as simple as that. It doesn't worry me. I never pretended to be." But he has known and, with characteristic detachment, admired all three.

Gielgud directed a Hamlet in which Guinness had a small part, and he can still hear that berating voice -- "like a silver trumpet muffled in silk." "Go away," he told Guinness crossly. "Come back in a week. Get someone to teach you how to act." Guinness did nothing except mope for seven days, but his absence was enough. Gielgud was now delighted with the young actor's new interpretation.

Perhaps the most endearing portrait is that of the eccentric Richardson. Directing Guinness in an Old Vic production of Richard II, Sir Ralph had only a few words of advice. Holding up a sharpened pencil, he said, "Play it like this pencil, old cock." Guinness admits that he was not greatly illuminated, and his Richard was a failure of which he is still ashamed.

In later years Richardson always had a silver tankard of champagne waiting for those who visited him backstage. Once, when Guinness came by, he rose and made a military-style toast: "To Jesus Christ. What a splendid chap!" Another time, when they were both starring in Doctor Zhivago, Sir Alec walked into Richardson's hotel suite in Madrid. "Who can one hit," said Richardson, "if not one's friends?" -- and punched him in the jaw. By the time Guinness raised himself from the floor to ask what was going on, Richardson was sound asleep in an armchair.

Guinness himself seems removed from such mad scenes. Like George Smiley, the most interesting character of his later years, he is more of a reactor than an initiator, an amused but always clear-eyed observer. Part of that ironic aloofness may come from his childhood. His mother lived from hand to mouth, and he never knew who his father was. He was forced to adapt, and he has been doing that ever since, making a brilliant career out of pouring himself into a myriad of molds. He is now a little startled, however, to discover some of his mannerisms in his son Matthew, 45, who is also an actor. "A good actor," says his father, "although out of work at the moment."

Occasionally, while the elder Guinness is turning the TV dial, searching for the news or a nature program, he comes across one of his many selves. "I switch it off within 30 seconds," he says with a slight shudder. "Once I've done something, it doesn't really have any interest for me anymore." He likes movies, but he loves the stage and is even now on the lookout for a good play. At the moment Alan Bennett (The Old Country) is his favorite English playwright; David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), his favorite American. Between roles, Sir Alec and his wife Merula play country folk in a home 55 miles southwest of London, near Winchester. "Farmland round and about," he says. "It's a very simple house, and it's always untidy, always dusty and ill cared for, it seems to me. But we love it."

Hearing that an expressway was to pass close by, they bought another house last September and put the old homestead on the market. But they quickly repented. "That is where half my life has been spent," he says, "and where my various pets are buried. Everything kind of spreads out from there." Now the new house is for sale, and he and Merula are comforting themselves with a wry, Guinness-style logic: "We're going to be so old and blind and deaf by the time the road gets there that maybe we won't notice it." Old age seems a long way off for such a quick mind, and those eyes and ears, which have missed nothing for the past 50 years, will remain keen and amused for years to come.