“Oh Christ, This place is Falling Apart,” Says Maureen Stapleton, Sitting in Her Worn, Warm Living Room
In a house dress, with no make-up, her luminous beauty shines through a graying day
The Washington Star, December 13, 1979: NEW YORK — “I hope to Christ the windows aren’t too dirty. Oh, Christ, this place is falling apart. I was thinking, today, I need new slipcovers.” The voice has the roll of an Irish brogue, a thrilling timber.
At the photographer’s suggestion, Maureen Stapleton has seated herself next to the front windows of her living room. They are not curtained and the shutters are open. “Oh, God, the windows are dirty,” she says, unalarmed. And the slipcovers are frayed. The actress, herself, wears a rumpled housedress, not a scrap of makeup, and her brownish hair is gray at the temples. Details that somehow are irrelevant.
Stapleton’s luminous beauty shines through it all, putting a patina on the well-used room, with its wall full of books and souvenirs, including a framed embroidery: “Home Sweet Home.” It is the home of a person who has no room in her life for possessions and interior decors.
An Actor’s Studio alumna, one of Tennessee Williams’ own (“The Rose Tattoo,” “Orpheus Descending,” a glorious revival of “The Glass Menagerie”), Maureen Stapleton — like many other pros — got her national audience through television. She was “The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom,” one of the most blissfully sincere television dramas ever made; there was never a false note. As a widow who falls in love (with Charles Durning) and kicks up her heels, Stapleton was enchanting.
She will be playing a widow again in NBC’s “The Gathering, Part II,” a sequel to Hanna-Barbera’s Emmy-winning “The Gathering,” which costarred Ed Asner as Stapleton’s terminally ill, estranged husband. In this drama, she is more subdued, but has, nonetheless, a joyous romance with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. A good program transmuted to pure gold by her presence.
Stapleton’s naturalness and her joie de vivre are trademarks. In Woody Allen’s somber, esoteric composition “Interiors,” a movie that appealed to a limited audience, Stapleton stole the show in a red dress and with an exuberant performance as the husband’s brassy second wife, (The first wife, gorgeously played by Geraldine Page, was a drag.) Woody Allen, she points out, choreographed the contrast she made with the rest of the cast, and with the monochromatic interiors that gave the film’s title one of its several meanings.
Stapleton considers herself a character actress, rather than a star. As such, a staple item in the actor’s marketplace. But while she is fond of saying she’ll play anything as long as it doesn’t make her throw up — you’ll notice you don’t see her in junk. Which is the reason she had the whole summer off to spend on her new houseboat moored on the Mohawk River in Cohoes, N.Y., just outside of Troy, which is where she comes from and where most of her family still lives.
No, she’s not a sailor. She just “likes the water,” and somehow she got the idea that the best way to get out on it was to have her own boat. “A houseboat is my speed,” she comments, laconically. “I’m usually frightened in anything that moves.” A rougher than expected trip up the Hudson with friends this summer, she notes, “scared the hell out of me.” She’s learning how to operate the boat herself, “but I still haven’t learned how to stop it.”
Maureen Stapleton is not an actressy actress; she is a woman without pretension. She sits in the waning light of a gray afternoon, sipping white wine and smoking one cigarette after another. It could be a characterization for a role. But it is Maureen Stapleton, herself.
She’s owned the top two floors of a four-story brownstone for the past 23 years and now lives by herself on the third floor, which consists of the living room, a kitchen and her large bedroom, also furnished rather than decorated, and, at the moment rumpled. Upstairs, lives her son, Danny. 29, and his girlfriend, both, she says, “working on a very serious documentary film.” Her daughter, Kathy, 24, works in the office of the Berkshire Theater in Stockbridge, Mass., but has no ambition to follow her mother’s career. “She had a role in “The Summer of ‘42.’ She enjoyed it. But that was it.”
Stapleton was divorced years ago from her children’s father, Max Allentuck, but they have remained in close contact. She considers Allentuck’s three children by his second marriage part of her family. And as far as she’s concerned, “family is the best thing I’ve ever had. My family is my life.” She’s quiet and the room seems to settle down. “There’s something primitive in your feeling about family,” she muses.
She’s never remarried because, she says, she really prefers to live alone: “I just don’t think I’m the marrying kind.” Stapleton claims to be “madly in love with Joel McCrea. But he’s still married to Frances Dee, who isn’t ugly.” You have to decide she isn’t kidding. She says she started out wanting to be a movie star. “But,” she sighs, taking a long draw on her cigarette, “that didn’t happen. When I was young I thought life stopped after ‘Gone With the Wind.’ “ Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were, for her, “the epitome of love.”
Being a character actress doesn’t bother her a bit. “A good part is a good part.” And she thinks it may be because she’s a woman. Her “dearest friends” are Colleen Dewhurst and Zoe Caldwell, also once lead players, stars who are getting more and more “supporting” roles, character roles. “I always thought it would be much more difficult for a man in the theater. When a woman is out of work, her womanhood isn’t on the line. But a man. His manhood is on the line. It’s more of a burden.”
The women’s movement leaves her cold. (Unlike woman’s rights activist Jean Stapleton, who played Archie Bunker’s wife in “All in the Family” and who is no relation.) “I’ve worked all my life,” she says, wryly. “It doesn’t seem like such a novelty with me.”
Stapleton is funny when she talks about the new morality in movies. Not that “anybody ever asked me to take off my clothes.” “Saturday Night Fever,” which she attended with her daughter, “was a six-cigarette movie. Every time it got too raunchy for me, I went out in the lobby for a cigarette.” Her two most recent movies are “The Runner Stumbles” and “Lost and Found.”
She doesn’t knock television acting, although its speed worries her some, “I go through a door on Monday and don’t come out until Thursday. And I don’t know what the hell I did.” Stapleton had her own sit-com for a few brief weeks in 1977, “There’s Always Room,” which she feels failed “because it wasn’t quite fearless enough.”
If network television ever does dare to produce a brave, true series about a middle-aged woman who finds life, with its discontents and its ironies, a human comedy, Maureen Stapleton is the actress waiting in the wings.
Original Title: Rare Staple: An Actress Without Pretension
