Great Scott!

In the film Patton, there is a mysterious, beautifully photographed scene in which the monomaniacal and supremely individualistic World War Two general, standing with an aide in a graveyard of war in North Africa, delivers this moving and evocative self-summation: "I fought and strove and perished countless times. ... As through a glass darkly the age-old strife I see. ... For I fought in many guises. ... Had many names. ... But always me."

This does nicely as an epigraph for George Campbell Scott, whose towering performance as Patton is only the most recent, though certainly among the most successful, of the pitched battles he has fought on stage and sound set to uncover the many the names of George C. Scott: from Richard III to Shylock, from Bert Gordon in The Hustler to General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, from the maniac who tore off the head of a bird in Comes a Day to the relentless prosecutor of Andersonuville Trial, who stood alone for an unyielding and wrathful integrity and for the moral principle that ultimately every man is responsible for his own acts and cannot entrust his soul to some duly constituted authority. The special quality that Scott brings to each of his performances is a commitment and a dedication that bespeak his identification with his roles. His intensity inspires fear and awe in about equal proportions.

In Boston, during the rehearsals of Plaza Suite, his co-star Maureen Stapleton went up to the director, Mike Nichols, and said, "I feel I have to tell you, Mike, that George scares me half to death."

"But don't you know, Maureen?" Nichols replied. "George scares the whole world half to death."

Miss Stapleton also expresses the other view: "When George comes onstage, it's like a force of nature. When he walks in and stands there quietly, it's like an earthquake."

A young Broadway actor with a small role in the soon-to-be-released They Might Be Giants says it even more succinctly: "Scott? Scott is like ... a holy actor. He acts from a place inside himself. ..." Here the young actor shook his head mutely and expressively.

George C. Scott does not believe himself to be, as Patton did, one of the universe's vital forces, destined, or doomed, to re-create himself through the ages for some dimly sensed but inevitable master purpose. And while Patton was a religious fanatic, Scott (who once was deeply religious) is an unruffled atheist. Yet there is something in his body of work, and in his often tortured private life, that suggests some comparable unraveling of fateful life strands. Patton, the archetypal Warrior. Scott, the archetypal Actor. Each, in his own way, bedeviled by some urgent sense of mission. Both peculiarly haunted.

"I studied General Patton as comprehensively as humanly possible," says Scott. "He was a very complicated human being and I never came to any conclusion about what I wanted the character to say, though everybody thought I did. One guy said to me, I know that General Patton couldn't have been the foulmouthed, swaggering bully you made him out to be. Then somebody else says, Why have you humanized this brute, this wretched fascist? But you cannot do that: When you editorialize in any way, you're getting into a function that's not the actor's. You just try to be as fair as possible, as reflecting as possible, as mirror-like. It happens by osmosis, really, over a long period of time. What enables you to decide what to use and what not to use is instinct, a sixth sense--either the fast ball hops or it doesn't.

"One has to use one's own body, after all, to try to get the most penetrating habits and characteristics. In the case of General Patton, it was his carriage. I have never seen him slouched. He was an erect human being. I'm sure he slept straight. I can't picture him in a fetal position, even as a child. And there was a problem about the voice. General Patton had a high, squeaky voice. I felt it would have been a mistake to emulate that. People would have missed half of the rest of what I was trying to do, so I threw that out early. The facial thing, the make-up: I shaved my head daily and wore an extremely good half-bald piece. He had a longer face than mine, a longer jaw than mine. I have a kind of beaky nose and a crumped-up chin. We tried to straighten the nose by drawing it upward with a piece of plastic and net. And the teeth were especially good, I thought. I had my dentist make false teeth that fit over my own. They lengthened my jaw, which got away from the crumpy look I have--I look like an old man chewing tobacco--and gave me a considerably more patrician jawline. And they helped with the speech, too, because I had to whistle through them. All those things helped, even little things like the mole under the left eye. Patton also had a very large mole on his left ear, and we used that even though it didn't show, it got lost in the crinkling of the cartilage of the ear.

"What else? He was a publicly emotional person. He would cry at the sight of green grass, his emotions were so close to the surface. He was not known to have any sort of sexual perversion of any kind, and wasn't a dirty-joke teller. He wouldn't allow sexual stories to be told at his mess. He was not a philanderer of any kind; he didn't drink to excess. Certainly any other kind of excess would have been alien to his character. Talk about dedication. He really was tuned to this one thing, soldiering. Now I happen to abhor war, but I couldn't for a moment let that interfere with my profession. As an actor my job is to obliterate George C. Fink," Scott concludes, "and present only the character's emotions. Now this is very destructive. Very destructive. Actors cannot and should not live long."

Actors die and are reborn, and many suffer plenty for it. Many drink too much. "My well-known alcoholic binges," Scott says. "Well, coming off one of those is a terrible, horrible experience. A kind of annihilation. You don't know where you've been or what you've done or where you are. It's just the nearest thing to dying. You're ... nothing. It's like dying and being born again."

With his complex, ambiguous, thickly textured portrayal of Patton--which won for him the New York Film Critics' Best Actor Award and may well bring him his first Academy Award--Scott has been born again somewhere very near the pinnacle of his profession. Some people, including Scott, think Laurence Olivier is the world's first actor. Others, including John Huston and three or four other ranking film directors, think Scott is.

Otto Preminger says, "The strength of a very great performance, like Scott's Patton, is that you cannot imagine anybody else playing it. He does things with perfectly ordinary lines that give them something special. It's really amazing."

People he has worked with credit this skill not only to superb natural equipment but also to an unceasing intellectual curiosity. They speak of his constant searching, his willingness to experiment. Robert Rossen tells of Scott's "built-in batteries." In Plaza Suite, he had the idea of playing large stretches of the second act in the hall--which was offstage. That device was shortly dropped, but many of his ideas do eventually work their way into the finished product. Art Carney says, simply, "He puts everything into it."

Unsurprisingly, one of his pet peeves is the highly skilled actor who, he says, "pulls back at the end and lets himself be used by the system. Lee Marvin is one. Richard Burton is the epitome of what we're talking about." Scott is the epitome of what he himself calls the "risk" actor, willing to go into unknown territory and risk the sudden arrow out of the still jungle, or the unexpected deposit of manure underfoot.

"He leaps off prepared positions," says Saul Levitt, the author of Andersonville Trial. "He thrashes about in the dark. An orgasmic kind of thing. There are very few who have that quality. The risk is the thing."

A few years back Scott was collaborating on a book and told his co-author, Tom Leith, "I think all the courage that I may lack personally I have as an actor."

• • •

As one who has seen the films and plays and read all the reviews, I expected George C. Scott to be: "monstrous and disruptive" (Richard Watts, Jr.), "a case from a Freudian textbook" (Walter Kerr), "the devil himself" (Bosley Crowther) and "either smiling like a bloodstained shark or croaking like a gangster sea lion" (Clive Barnes). At any rate, he would certainly be "a man who could have done with some restraint" (Jack Gould).

Disappointingly, he proved to be none of these. "I suppose I am known as an aggressive man," he said. "I am not an aggressive man and never have been." He flashed a quick shy smile. "Except when I drink."

He was not drinking and was decidedly not aggressive. His wife, the actress Colleen Dewhurst, was present, and it was she who dominated the conversation. Scott was mellow and deferential, (continued on page 192) Great Scott! (continued from page 140) exhibiting an almost paternal pride in her stories and anecdotes, some of which are affectionately derisive. "I showed up here in Philadelphia and I thought, he's a big star, we'll have a car or a cab; well, I had to walk over here. And in high heels, right? Look at the way he's dressed." Scott was wearing nondescript brown trousers and a yellow knit short-sleeved sport shirt, which is his habitual attire. "Beautiful, eh?" she snorted. "Tried to dress him this morning. Look at him. H'm. H'm. OK, star."

Scott laughed immoderately at this tirade, and a few moments later--on The Mike Douglas Show, which he was cohosting for a week--acknowledged that he and his wife were married and then divorced and then, in 1967, remarried.

"Why did we remarry?" he mused. "I often ask myself that."

"There are some people who are stuck with each other," she explained. "And G. C. and I are more or less stuck with it." (She calls him G. C. He calls her Moms.) "Even when we were divorced we somehow couldn't let go that last little string. At school one little boy said his mom and dad were divorced and he was sad about it, and our ten-year-old, Alex, said, 'Oh, that's all right, my mom and dad are divorced, but whenever he gets off work he comes to our house, he lives there, they're very good friends.' I could see all the teachers sitting around saying, 'You know what happens at the Scotts? Sin. Sin.' "

Scott reared his head back and laughed. After the show, the Scotts and some friends and playwright Levitt went off to have some steaks, and during the meal G. C. and his wife aired their disagreement about the film M. A. S. H., which she loved.

"Half the budget was raw meat," Scott said. "Every time he got in trouble he flashed back to the operating room with the blood. Cheap tricks. To me, the worst sin of all is cheapness and shoddiness."

"He was offended by the mike-in-the-sack thing," Colleen explained. "George is the biggest prude underneath. He tears your earrings off, pulls your skirt down, covers up your cleavage. Loves to see all the other girls, right? But he goes to the movies and sees something, he says, terrible taste, terrible taste."

Scott had begun grinning. He was still arguing, but halfheartedly: "You're right, dear. I'm totally wrong and you're right"--recognizing them to be at a familiar impasse.

She has a rapid delivery, forming the words into little hard balls back in her throat and sending them out, pop, pop, like solid objects till they fill the air in front of her, and she gets excited as she talks and builds volume and power as she goes. He, on the other hand, is gentle, gentlemanly, restrained. There is something shy and tentative about him. He is easily interrupted. Like a truckload of gravel backing slowly into traffic.

Scott directed her recently, for the first time, in a short-lived Broadway play, and each agreed the experience was good for both of them. "She's an enormously powerful actress," he said, "a powerful personality on the stage, and I got her to pull most of that back and let it ooze out a little bit at a time. That's something most directors have used too much in her, forced her to go to too much, and consequently she usually wipes up the stage with any male that she works with. There are very few actors that can stand with her. I got her to pull back and it was a most restrained and a most beautiful performance."

She laughed nervously. "I don't know who we're complimenting here."

Once again Scott smiled. That familiar quick flicker that spreads out across his face like a stain and then just as swiftly disappears. An invitation, and a booby trap.

• • •

The next time I saw Scott he was directing Andersonville Trial as the pilot project for producer Lewis Freedman's new drama series for educational television. The rehearsals were in studio B at KCET in Los Angeles and the cast was the sort invariably referred to as star-studded. It was heavily weighted with high-priced talent, most of them refugees from commercial-television series, eager for a chance to do some real acting. Without exception, they all said that one of the reasons they were willing to accept minimum scale at NET was the chance to work with George Scott. Freed-man admits that when he approached the actors he lured them with Scott's name. "I have rarely seen a rehearsal hall that's so full of interest," Freedman said. "I mean, I've almost never seen a full-length play rehearsed where almost the entire cast stays in the hall-- interested, hard-working, challenged, and also enjoying itself."

Watching Scott work is a little bit like watching a surgeon's scalpel hovering over a recumbent form. He stands poised, alert, motionless, and then ... argggh ... he swoops. In the end you know the tumor will have been nicked out with skill and precision, but in the meantime you fear for the delicate flesh: There is all that intensity in his hefty, high-shouldered slab of a body--intensity and pursuit. He is a bird of prey and the victim is ... weakness? ... human error? ... chance itself?

"I wonder, Willy," Scott says to Bill Shatner, lately of Star Trek. "That's a sarcastic line. Lean on him some. Hmmm?" Smoke from a Lucky Strike wreathes his fingers. He is wearing blue slacks and a blue knit sport shirt. His arms are crossed on his large chest and he strokes repeatedly at his cheek in an up-and-down motion. "Jack," he says to Jack Cassidy, "I had a thought. I don't know, you might hate it. But see if you can play a little homey thing with Dr. Bates. You know, a little ... shit kicking." The grin spreads on his face, a look of delight. He actually brightens. He is very decisive, he knows exactly what he wants.

Richard Basehart has a long, moving speech. Scott is poised breathlessly, enraptured, his lips moving slowly, mouthing the words, his head thrown back. His teeth are clenched and the corners of his mouth are drawn back. The speech ends, the rehearsal goes on. Scott darts forward and on his face is that familiar smile that is a way station to released anger. He begins to instruct Shatner in a speech that he himself once spoke onstage. Shatner has the part he played in the Broadway version. As he offers Shatner a thought, he begins to enact the part. "At this point over here, Chipman goes a little bit ... insane," he says, the whisper of his voice beginning to catch and develop traction and come out a hoarse growl. His face brightens with malicious glee. His eyes widen. His nose and chin (a profile Kenneth Tynan once described as a "victorious bottle opener") seem to strain for each other as his mouth spreads across his face like a family curse. His large bony bulged forehead glistens. His jaw, which normally is rippled and indistinct, goes stiff and firm. The entire set comes to a stillness. "A little bit insane, a little bit ... pathological. See if you can go ... just a little bit ... apeshit. You know? Enjoy it."

He is advancing on Shatner as he talks, Shatner in the witness seat. Shatner sees something in Scott's eye. He lifts his feet and kicks them, mimicking fear. Shatner is himself a baby bull, all neck and chest. He has gotten some message from Scott's neural system. He has made a joke of it, but for a moment there he was afraid.

Scott once went drinking with Lewis Freedman and remarked, "You know, they used to burn actors and they were right. Because actors constantly are showing them things they don't want to see." Scott is a man who sets very high standards for himself and then tries to beat his own best time. This is a lonely, and alienating, way to go in a profession that makes very great demands on a person's power to resist collapse and disintegration.

"Like Scott," Freedman said, "all real actors have that in them to begin with. But unlike Scott, they soon learn to shut up about it. And we have a wonderful machine for shutting them up called money. We buy out our talent. But Scott won't be bought out. He's always been more than an actor. He's been a man of the theater."

After rehearsals, Scott went out for lunch and talked directly to this point: "This is one of the most competitive businesses, but not in a direct way, not actor against actor. The competition and the stress and the strain come from within, in assaulting the goal. Not only serious actors, in a sense all actors. Even those who fall by the wayside. The unsung and unmarked graves. Those who didn't have what it takes to hang around long enough to see whether anybody gives a shit about them one way or another. And it's very personal. It's not like writing or painting. At least they don't have to be there breathing when the guy says you're shit to your face. The actor has to be there. So the nervous pressure, the actual tension on the nervous system, is constant. An opening night is a trauma unrivaled in the experience of man. You're a smashed milk bottle of 10,000 jagged pieces stuck together with Elmer's Glue. As my friend Vince Callahan the make-up man used to say, the tenseeyun and the pressee-yure as you try to scale those unscalable heights. The totally untakable objective. Iwo Jima. San Juan Hill. Outclassed, outmanned, out gunned. With nobody on your side. And yet, somebody often does it."

"It sounds horrible," I said.

"Yes, it is. Horrible. Why do I do it? It could be simple masochism, but I don't think so. It's some sort of ... compulsion."

"Many are called but few are chosen," I said. "Many are chosen but few accept."

He sighed. "If you really have it you can't get it off your back. It's like ... it's like being ... professional. It's the best word I know. I don't know of a better word."

"Well, you seem very professional as a director."

He laughed and said he was extremely nervous, feeling himself way over his head. Yet he never showed it during rehearsals. He flashed his devil-boy smile: "That's acting, too."

• • •

Scott came by his professionalism naturally. He was born in Wise, Virginia, on October 18, 1927, where his father was first a miner and then a mine foreman. The elder Scott, now retired, is described as a charming and handsome man with lots of energy and a competitive style dedicated to victory. He was born to unrelenting poverty in a mountain cabin in southwest Virginia, educated himself (on the way acquiring, it is said, an astonishing accumulation of information) and wound up as the vice-president for sales of a firm in Detroit. The Scotts are an old American family of Scotch-Irish blood dating back to before the American Revolution, Virginia artisans rather than aristocrats. This perhaps accounts for Scott's sense of responsibility to the job itself. He has a strong sense of family and history and tradition, and even in casual conversation he expresses a stern moral code. His stubborn integrity, moral rigidity--and perhaps his drinking--have much to do with the Protestant work ethic and a well-disciplined childhood. Friends say that "George thinks a great deal of his dad and admires him tremendously. In his memory he was a strong father who provided well for his family, not a shilly-shallyer, a man who knew right from wrong."

"It always bothered me," Scott told an interviewer early in his career, "that with the easy life I had, compared to my father's, I couldn't get anywhere."

Scott describes his early years as "totally average, totally undistinguishable, except for the death of my mother at the age of eight. My age of eight, not hers. She died of blood poisoning. This was prior to penicillin and sulfa. The kind of thing that would be cured with a few pills or one shot--even only ten years later. That kind of trauma is profound."

Following four unremarkable years at Redford High in Detroit, Scott enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1945 for a four-year hitch. His father had remarried when George was 12 and the boy left home at 17 partly just to leave home (he was not close to his stepmother) and partly because he was a gung-ho kid "very anxious to fight." Instead he buried people at Arlington National Cemetery and learned how to drink. He says he "haunted sleazy bars in Washington," commencing a slide that was to land him within ten years in the grip of an apparently irresistible impulse to drink himself into an alcoholic rage and stupor.

In 1949, Scott entered the University of Missouri School of Journalism and discovered acting. He began a college-and-stock-theater career that was to encompass 125 roles, an apprenticeship that Scott, who otherwise had no training, calls "a terrific education." But he left school with only two credit hours to go. He was self-evidently in the wrong career, since "even asking somebody's address was offensive to me." Out of school, he worked as an actor at a nearby girls' school, Stephens College, where he found his first wife, Carolyn Hughes, and with the Mad Anthony Players in Toledo, Ohio.

John O'Leary, an actor and playwright who remembers Scott from those days, recalls that he had not yet broken his nose and was "like a handsome Hollywood leading man." Since then the nose has been broken several times, proving, Scott says, that he can't be all that good with his fists. Even in those days, he was undependable. He disappeared from a dress rehearsal of a show in which he had the lead, and returned only just before the opening curtain. There is some possibility that if director Stuart Vaughan's memory were better, Scott's career might have taken longer to flower: In the summer of 1952 Vaughan heard from friends about this very talented but wildly erratic fellow, and he remembers thinking, Well, there's one actor I want to be sure to steer clear of. "If I had put two and two together I never would have hired him for Richard III," Vaughan recollects. "But that wasn't the Scott I met in 1957."

In the interim, Scott had been to New York without success and then in 1954 to Los Angeles, where he lived for six months with a friend and his wife, who supported him. He was, he says, totally unemployable. He would go off in the morning and sit on a park bench all day. Subsequently he bummed around the country (the birth of a daughter had only aggravated his drinking and soon he and his wife had separated and divorced) and finally landed in Washington, D.C., penniless and defeated. He took off a year to recover himself, working for his older sister's husband, a contractor, as a laborer. "I gave it my all," he remembers. "I was having the pleasure of working with people who can do something better than you and seeing if you can make the grade."

One day he wandered into a semipro-fessional theater in his laborer's clothes and asked for a job. "When I read, they knew I was an actor," he told me--as if to say that he had always been an actor, as if to say that, whatever else, he could always go behind the proscenium and search out his secret names. Here he found his second wife, Pat Reed, and commenced his second family. He moved to New York and took a job as an IBM operator in a bank.

When he read for Stuart Vaughan and Joseph Papp for the New York Shakespeare Festival's 1957 production of Rich-ard III, Vaughan failed to connect him with the young man he had heard about five years earlier. Scott read twice, badly, and then tied one on. He woke up the next morning in the garden of a friend's house. After drying out and preparing again, he read a third time.

"With Shakespeare," Vaughan says, "you look for vocal skill and range and a feel for the language. And energy. And of course Scott had all these in abundance. Also, with an actor you don't know, someone who can respond to your direction. Scott was very responsive, he was never troublesome, even though, like most young actors, he was brandishing his masculinity about as a protective device against homosexual advances, which all actors get. I understand this was a troubled time for him, but I saw no evidence of it. Most people you work with in this business who are especially talented are in great turmoil or much agonized, and I expect the working part of their lives is the healthiest."

This was certainly true of Scott. He was appearing in a succession of plays both off and on Broadway for which he was received with the same sort of praise that greeted the young Brando, and he won all sorts of awards. He was hired for a Western called The Hanging Tree and then for Anatomy of a Murder, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Yet for all that, George C. Scott was not what you would call a contented man. "The more successful I got, the worse the drinking became." The discipline he maintained when he worked in the Shakespearean plays for Vaughan was disintegrating. One day he destroyed a set on Hanging Tree. While he was appearing in his first Broadway play, in November 1958, he woke up in a New York City jail and learned that on the previous evening, while drunk, he had beaten up a man. He had no memory of the fight. (It was not the first time, nor would it be the last. In the summer of 1965, a suit for $100,000 in damages was filed against him by an actor who claimed Scott had assaulted him.)

Vaughan remembers that "George had this switch he could turn on for Richard III, a device, a sound, when he wanted to show a rage thing. He had an absolutely convincing way of doing it. But technically he was under control. ...I suppose this quality was at his finger tips."

Onstage he was portraying men in whom some gnawing passion was either just barely contained (and therefore terrifying) or released in a climactic moment. The New York Time's Walter Kerr described one of his roles as "a clear, alarming, brilliantly convincing case from a Freudian textbook." The New York Post's Richard Watts, Jr., said of the same part (in Comes a Day) that it was "managed with such monstrous power and shocking credibility that the sadist becomes not just a villain of melodrama but a terrifyingly real human being." Offstage his second marriage was collapsing and the pressures were such that Scott was undergoing his fits of drunken violence more and more frequently. Every three months. Every month. Every week.

"George once said to me, 'There's no man in the world who fears and hates violence more than I do,' " says Colleen Dewhurst. "He doesn't think he has courage because he has so many fears. He's a bad dreamer. He'll be asleep and call out, 'You bastards, you bastards, get away, get away!' "

Scott tried Alcoholics Anonymous and he tried therapy. He even tried what Art Carney calls ten-cent therapy. "One day he called me up because I've had trouble with the booze on occasion," Carney says. "One drinker understands another. He was in bum shape, so he called and we had a long chat."

For a man who considers self-discipline a prime virtue, the guilts are considerable. "They are," Scott told me. "Oh, the guilts. It's a very easy dodge to say, look, I'm gifted, I'm talented, so you have to put up with my foibles, my little ... aberrations. I've been guilty of that all my life," he said slowly, deliberately, painfully. "I always knew I had something--way before anybody else knew it. And the minute you try to make people accept the ugliness of you because of this, you've done an un ... an unfair thing. And something indecent, actually. So one person in ten million has something special, fine, but that's no license to kill."

"Whom have you killed?" I asked.

"It's not even a license to fish, you see what I mean? Well I've done it ten thousand times. And every time I did it I knew I was going to do it before I did it and was ashamed of doing it all along and was ashamed after I'd done it. These feelings come out when I drink because one loses one's inhibitions. And one's (continued on page 200) Great Scott! (continued from page 197) control. Control is self-discipline and maturity. And too much control is awful, is self-repression. But discipline is great. Self-discipline is one of the greatest things in the world. I wish I had more of it. In many ways I am disciplined, particularly when I see a job to do, or am committed to a task. I'm almost unstoppable. But there are a lot of things I should do that I don't do. And I'm weak, lazy, stupid, or indifferent."

I said it was my impression that his reputation was altogether different.

"I know I do it," He said with passion. "I know I do it and that's all that's necessary." After a pause he flashed that booby-trap smile, which is not a smile at all but a nervous reflex that is meant to mask pain too weighty to bear often: Phantoms crowding in on his night of rest, an unpitying judgment forming in his dreams as the many names of George C. Scott flash by. "I know a lot of other people do it too. Thank God I'm not alone in this mire."

• • •

A role that Scott has played in several guises, each time well and convincingly, is the bearded patriarch, or mythic Father. Or, as Sault Levitt says, "his motif is virility." In The Bible, he played Abraham with stern-faced intensity and little warmth. He enacted another version of this in Desire Under the Elms, another as the eponymous General Seeger, and yet another as Proctor in The Crucible. He played a comic version of the role in the third act of Plaza Suite, as the father of the bride. A very close friend, who has lived with G. C. and Moms, says that this last role is closer to the George C. Scott she knows than any other. My own vote would be for The Crucible, which I had screened just before visiting Scott at his 32-acre farm in South Salem, New York. Certain images were vivid and certain lines buzzed in my head. Proctor saying, simply, "I may speak my heart, I think." A man of stubborn integrity resisting the wave of witch-hunt foolishness sweeping over Salem (Massachusetts, not New York). A skeptical, anguished man laboring under a heavy burden of guilt for having failed to resist his sexual feelings. Proctor's wife, played by Colleen Dewhurst, telling him, "I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you." Proctor, in a moment of despair, crying out, "Who will judge me? God in heaven, what is John Proctor? What is John Proctor?" And, finally, Proctor tearing up his confession of witchcraft with a rending cry from that place inside George Scott, from beyond the door that George Scott has opened and cannot close, from where John Proctor Knows what he is, from that place of ultimate loneliness that no one who has not been prepared to visit it can know: "Because it is my name. Because I will never have another in my life. How may I live without my name?"

Scott was wearing a full salt-and-pepper beard the day I visited. "I hate sideburns and I'm doing Rochester in Jane Eyre, so when I get to England I'll shave the beard off and leave the sideburns," he explained. "Then I may direct a film for David Susskind and after that I direct Colleen on Broadway. Economically, I'd like to do one more picture this summer. I make 15 times more as an actor than I can as a director." He displayed that day an abundance of a character trait that is immediately apparent in him and that few actors possess. Call it humanity, warmth, reality; call it the ability to distinguish between a performance and a dialog, between the carefully constructed self-image that lights up the silver screen and the vulnerable, real human being who has on occasion to buy groceries, feel loneliness, and stop at red lights. Martin Buber the philosopher calls it "presentness." Scott can be rude and boorish (I am told, never having seen it myself), but that is out of his vast impatience with stupidity and tastelessnes, and is not too high a price to pay if you are neither stupid nor tasteless.

He sauntered across the grounds of his farm, which he has improved with a guesthouse that also holds the Scotts' Mercedeses, and a pool and a gazebo under construction, pausing to point out the magnolia and the flowering apple and the meadow where he means to do some planting, pausing a moment with strength and gentleness to pull a tick out of the ear of one of a half-dozen German shepherds that scramble around in the yard, and then coming into the old farmhouse past the den where his sons Alexander, ten, and Campbell, nine, sat glued to the TV screen ("They're very unimpressed with their movie-star father. Now if I could get booked on Hee Haw...."), and on into the living room, which is casually furnished with a few inelegant but comfortable couches and has books and paintings lying about in profusion.

"This is my sanity," Scott said. "Out here the business doesn't touch us. There's no way for the business to get to us or to the children."

"Alex can't stand to lose," he remarked. "He'd rather die than be beaten. At tiddlywinks, at anything. The most competitive person I've ever known." He grinned sweetly, not his fake smile. "He's got a lot of my father in him," he said. "Now Campbell, nothing apparently bothers him. It's all inside." He twisted his mouth wryly and raised his eyebrows, sending off generational echoes. "You never know what's going on in there. Everybody says we're very much alike."

"The brooders," Colleen said, wandering in. "Now Alex and I go at each other like George and Campbell do. You have to watch yourself, that's when you come in too hard. The things you hate in yourself, the characteristics you want to beat out."

Colleen wandered away and a moment later Alex wandered in, a cocky, selfassured youngster. He began telling Scott that he'd been playing ball but not getting any hits because he didn't have his glasses on. Scott pursed his lips and said, "I seeee. Hmmm. No see-um ball without goggles, eh?" Alex asked him to show up at the ball field the next morning at eight A.M. and Scott said, "Well I'll see you there, dear, but I can't promise I'll be there at eight o'clock. But I'll definitely be there."

Scott's friends agree that he is very domestic. Pat Zurica, a former New York City cop who travels with him as a companion, says that "George is a very quiet man, very shy, really a home-type person. He'd rather stay home and play cards and have a few beers, and he doesn't go for the glamor bit. When he finishes a film, he goes back to his farm."

"There is survival only in art and in children," Scott said. Somebody had brought some drinks in and in the slow, quiet afternoon he had become pensive. "But now, with children, you get the tension of creating a Frankenstein. The little bunny rabbit--the child--is so cute at first. But when it starts to do its bit, to become a person, you resist it. Because you are going down and it is coming up. The role is a bit of immortality. But the little bunny rabbit implies your death."

Alex came back in and said, "Dad, didn't you say we could watch TV two hours on Friday and Saturday?" and Scott frowned and said, "Are you going to put me up against your mother now?"

"Yeah." Alex giggled. "Ah, but no, Momma wanted to know."

"Momma wanted to know?" Alex giggled. Scott pointed and raised his chin. "What are you eating, jelly beans? Before dinner?"

"Yeah." They both giggled together, and then laughed. Alex turned his body and flung an imaginary ball sidearm.

"Well," Scott said judiciously, "you can watch more on Saturday night but not on Sunday night. And Alex," he added sternly, "I don't want a repeat of the homework thing that happened this morning, you know what I mean?" Alex grinned, nodded his head and ran off.

"I can't stand badly behaved children," Scott said vehemently. "I can't stand them around. I can't stand other people's children who are badly behaved. I won't have them. Not in my house. I simply tell the parents: Take the boy's ass out of the house." He took a sip of his drink. "But also I don't believe in breaking a child's spirit. I don't believe in hurting him. Not to destroy what is so ... valuable ... and so ... personal. That's the toughest thing. One of the big problems of our country is that there simply aren't enough fathers. Too many fuckers and not enough fathers. In this business you see more and more homosexuals, and that's a sadness. There's some basic ... irresponsibility there. I mean, God knows, nobody knows what goes on inside women. But why give up the research? That's half the fun in life. And you see more and more ballsy women and fewer ballsy men. And the thing I can't understand is that they have such contempt for women. Really. You know?"

It was the late spring of last year and conversation veered easily to politics and war. "Now this expression--make love not war. A terrible meaningless catch phrase. I believe in pacifism, I really do. I believe in being stretched and pushed to the last limit of endurance to try not to make waves. And the awful thing about this Cambodian venture is that Nixon has let the Presidency in for a wave of ... hideous ... contempt. Mr. Johnson was reputed to be a master tactician and he fell fiat on his face repeatedly as President. Mr. Nixon has the reputation for being one of the great machinators of all time and he may be going the same way. It's all kind of different once your as hits that particular seat. He's the man. And all bets are off. It either makes you or breaks you."

The conversation turned in a still natural flow to directors with whom Scott has worked. Preminger, "one of the most charming, well--educated, sweet mannered persons, rather shy, but he goes apeshit at times." Mike Nichols, who "creates an atmosphere with his own personality which is conducive to the actors being so relaxed, and the actor is so free. In Boston I had had it and I said, 'Mike, I can't get it up one more time,' and he said, 'Fine, George, I'll fire you if you tell me who I can get to replace you.' "

I asked him who his favorite was, and he said. "John Huston is possibly the greatest film director alive. It's a pleasure to lose an argument with him. He makes you feel not put down but simply that you understand what he means. And the insight and the dignity and the--I have to say it--the beauty he approaches a subject with. And the way he makes people feel." Was Huston what he would call a father figure, I asked. "Yes," he said, "I would say so. And I behaved badly with him, very badly." Scott was speaking slowly and thoughtfully. "It was all my fault. That was in Rome. I was going through a crisis in my own life at the time."

At the time his name was being linked by columnists with Ava Gardner's--his name, exploited--which helps to account for the virulence of his feelings toward columnists. He calls them parasites.

He had a troubled look on his face, and death was on his mind. "I think and have thought about death," he said. Not only because of Cambodia and Kent State and Jackson State but also because Inger Stevens had recently killed herself. "Every actor alive has had that impulse. "Every actor alive has has that impulse. And some of us say, No, I won't do that to myself. Some of us are joked out of it, some of us are clever enough to fake ourselves out of it. I don't think Miss Stevens learned anything about herself she didn't: know years before. It's those terrible little flukes. Of chance. Caught in those bad three hours. Next week she could have laughed at it. But nobody was there, or she couldn't get somebody on the phone. Marilyn, Lupe Velez, Carole Landis--Christ, they go back. Pedro Armendariz, Everett Sloane. It's been going on in our profession for hundreds of years. We are a suicidal people. Because we have to ... get that ... man ... right."

Alex came back in bearing a cake and said, "Dad, what shall I put on the cake for us?"

Scott had a very long distance to come back. He stared at his son for a moment as though he were looking at a complete stranger, and only gradually did the frostiness of his fixed gaze melt. "Uh ... is that a cake?"

"Yeah," Alex said.

"Uhhh ..." Scott shook his head and laughed and came thumping back to earth. "You have a cake."

"Right. It's for the weekend with the Scotts."

G. C. said, "I see."

Alex giggled and ran off. Scott gave him a long fond look as he left the room, and then shook his head and grinned from ear to ear. He was beaming.

"Some kid, eh?" he asked. He was as proud as could be. "No, I've come to the conclusion after years of thinking about it that very few of us are afraid of death. Because we don't know what it is. I think we're more afraid of being embarrassed or caught up in an awkward situation. I know that's what frightens me. It's like ... you don't want to cause a scene, you know what I mean? And if you've caused a number of scenes in your life you don't ever want to cause another one. And death to me is very much like that. I would hate to put people out. I know it sounds absurd, but that's exactly what really bothers me. I would hate to put a lot of people out."

After a very small pause, he flashed that instant smile of his, the invitation and the booby trap, and then it was gone as rapidly as it had come. A moment later, we went in to dinner and Scott sat at the head of the table, in the father's place, and he appeared very relaxed, he appeared to be enjoying himself immensely.