The Soul of Sarah

Picking up, three years late, on a canceled interview with Sarah Miles is not the first thing a weary Easterner wants to do on arriving in L.A.--City of Angels and of love goddesses en masse. Storm warnings have been posted by people who speak of Sarah in a whisper, the way they might speak about being trapped somewhere during the last big earthquake: "She's impossible." "Careful how you handle her." "Unpredictable, but you'll probably like her ... she's great with men." "Completely flaky ... and don't bring up that David Whiting business." "Very difficult." "No comment." Oh, well. It helps a little that she's so unequivocally damned brilliant in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with (continued on page 161)The Soul of Sarah(continued from page 128) the Sea. But then, she's always brilliant.

Such, understand, were a Playboy reporter's wary thoughts nearly a full week before he prompted Sarah Miles to throw a book at his head and learned that her aim is good.

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The quick, familiar voice on the telephone conveys no hint of menace and none of that chill, off-putting English reticence, either. And things happen fast. There's really no time right now, says she, because she's busy and will be working into the wee hours with a director and a musician on a project she can't discuss. So come along soon, eh, say 15 or 20 minutes? Either it's a bad connection or one party has misunderstood. No, because she's suddenly listing road signs: "You go up Benedict, pass West Wanda, turn right--it's a big red-barn house. The outside lights don't work, unfortunately, but there's a dirty gray, battered Volkswagen parked in front. That's mine----"

Wait a minute. Is this one of those remote Beverly Hills movie-star hide-outs that don't show up on radar and taxis can never find? How does one get away again? The question provokes a pause, followed by a throaty snigger. "One can always get away. Don't worry; I won't rape you. We might as well begin to get acquainted, just say hello, hmm?"

Off to see the wildcat. Forget that she was once described as "The Maiden Man-Eater" in an article by David Whiting, long before he became her man Friday and died tragically in a motel room at Gila Bend, Arizona, in 1973.

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Twenty-five minutes later, she appears at the door in semidarkness, with a snappish Skye terrier at her heels. The dog's name is Gladys, she says, as she leads us up the stairs to a room furnished with a large puffy sofa and a merry-go-round horse, still upright on its pole. There she stands, tremulously live, with an unruly Anglo mop of hair, eager child's eyes of bluish gray and a mouth almost too big in a face she insists is far too small. She's wearing a tight white-terrycloth jump suit with little or nothing under it.

She has soon found glasses and ice and vodka--though she seldom drinks--and is about to settle down in an alcove at a table heaped high with a tape recorder, tapes, manuscripts, scrawly notes, books, loose paper and what appears to be unopened mail. The thought occurs that the slender dynamo who has played The Servant's scheming minx, Ryan's Daughter and Lady Caroline Lamb seems unexpectedly tall. Now, there's a terrific opening gambit. Christ. But she answers it. "Well, of course. I'm feeling ten feet tall tonight! Because I've been at my writing. Which is funny, you know, because I'm practically illiterate.... I was asked to leave all those schools. Although I've read Mr. Shakespeare."

An hour with Sarah, especially the first hour, induces a kind of alpha state. She is a bright, multicolored prism spinning slowly or swiftly before your eyes, effecting kaleidoscopic changes. Her mysterious colleagues keep working at whatever it is behind closed doors while Sarah conducts a whirlwind tour through her past, present and future, with impromptu side trips into realms of fancy.

On being herself, doing things her way, she has a hundred and one anecdotes about how an overprivileged English wench--daughter of an eminent consulting engineer--can get into trouble by saying exactly what she thinks. There was the time she left a Noel Coward comedy during rehearsals because she refused to play her part the way it was written and suggested to the author that it had been rather carelessly written in the first place. Revealingly, Noel and Sarah later became fast friends. There were the teacup tempests at boarding schools, highlighted by one involving the queen mother of England: "On this particular occasion at Roedean, the queen mother came to visit us. I remember her standing in front of me, with her periwinkle-blue eyes. I've never seen such kind eyes. So when she asked me, 'How do you like it here?' I said, 'I hate it, Mum,' and burst into tears. Afterward, a friend of mine told the housemistress what I'd done and I was accused publicly in chapel--of telling the truth. That's where I learned that the truth is dangerous, people don't like it."

On her recent divorce from playwright Robert Bolt, author of A Man for All Seasons and the script for Ryan's Daughter, she is candid and searchingly self-critical: "There's no one to blame except me for anything I've done. When I married Robert, who's some years older than I am, I suppose I was choosing another father. My dear father is one of the most extraordinary men I've ever met. But when you're married to a brilliant man--and Robert is brilliant--you don't feel you can contribute much, which did put me in a strait jacket. I stopped acting for three years after Blow-Up. Not just retiring every other week, like Frank Sinatra. I came to a big, full stop. I had an ambition to breed horses, which I did, successfully. I also bred myself a child. I thought I was really enjoying my private life. Meanwhile, something told me that wasn't all I was meant to do. When I finally left, I didn't know why, where, who I was going to. what I intended to do. I just knew I had to go."

On her relationship with her eight-year-old son, Thomas, Sarah slips into a rueful mood as heart-rending as the heroine's third-act renunciation of home and hearth in A Doll's House: "Thomas is not with me at the moment, because I'm going through a big change and I have to go through it alone. Therefore, I'm no good as a mother right now. He's with his father, going to school in England."

On her ambivalent attitude toward life in L.A., Sarah discusses having rented out her own Malibu beach pad so she could share this Beverly Hills barn house with a female chum in public relations, who's "off on a European tour with Raquel" (yes, that Raquel): "The reason I left Malibu is that I got myself stuck into a very busy lethargy at the beach. Besides, I like swimming in the sea, which practically makes you an eccentric in Malibu. And I was told off for hanging clothes to dry outside my window on a line, because I like the smell of fresh air in them. They said it didn't look nice."

On a touchier subject (and the reason for postponement of our scheduled interview three years ago), the death of Whiting on location for the film The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, she falters momentarily, then lets the words come tumbling: "That whole public fiasco, that mess of publicity, was overwhelmingly painful for me and for anybody who knew David well, because he was an extremely good young man. He was brilliant but unbalanced--I never use the word insane, yet he was not sufficiently in touch with reality to stay among us. Or maybe he just chose to move on to the next life, I don't know. Though I do believe people sometimes take their lives because they feel they're going to another place that's better."

Sarah, who insists she hasn't smoked a regular cigarette in weeks, takes a thoughtful break while lighting one. "From the moment he first came into contact with my husband and me, David was lonely and strange. We were very close, very fond of him, both of us-- though there was certainly no ménage à trois, as so often implied, in the sense of three people having it off together. David's love for Robert and me was never physical. He placed us both so high, way up there; we were his king and queen, his god, his goddess, his father and mother. Of course, we knew he could be self-destructive, because he'd tried something like that the year before, and he had us sort of trapped. People who threaten death always have you trapped."

The publicity about Whiting's death made life in England impossible for Sarah. "I was infamous. I couldn't go down to the village, I couldn't move without being pointed at and whispered about. I wanted to be free; and for me, the only place in the world where you can live and not be noticed is Los Angeles. So I left home, being thought a murderess, arrived here and accepted an offer to play Shaw's Saint Joan at the Ahmanson Theater. It was very strange, as if people saw me as some kind of monster--and they were outraged that a monster was portraying a saint. It was not a good production, nor a critical success, but we played to packed houses every night. However, to show where the local critics are at, one of them led off his review by saying: 'This is not one of Shakespeare's better plays.' " Her laugh is warm, without bitterness or reproach.

Abruptly, she offers a lift back to your hotel, calls Gladys to wag along, wheels out the Volks and is tearing through Benedict Canyon as if she were an odds-on favorite in the Grand Prix. She confesses that she relishes danger: "I'm not proud of it, understand, but that's the way I am. I drive too fast, I swim too far out to sea; I climbed too high up in trees as a child--always did, always will. I want to be way out there on a limb. When you're out there, living on that thin edge, there's a kind of smell, a magic to life that you don't feel when you're in snug, perfect safety."

The two great evils of existence, in the Miles credo, are doubt and boredom--neither of which she can fully comprehend or take time out to practice. She enjoys quoting actor Robert Morley, who once remarked of her: "I'll say one thing for Sarah Miles, she never loses her enemies." Nor is she short on friends; over the years, they have included Laurence Olivier, Dame Edith Evans, the late Margaret Leighton ("We were twin souls, I still see her sometimes just before I fall asleep at night"), Robert Mitchum (a perennial confidant since Ryan's Daughter, Sarah calls him "acute and astute ... one of my greatest teachers") and Hollywood actor Bruce Davison (a more intimate friend for a year or so).

Director David Lean, after Ryan's Daughter, hailed Sarah as the only actress who can act with her eyes alone. Adds Lewis John Carlino, writer-director of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea: "Both as an actress and as a person, Sarah is a fourth-dimensional woman. If she once trusts you, she has no sense of self-preservation. Whatever you ask her to do, she'll reach down inside herself and give you everything there is to be gotten, and then some. She's intensely emotional, a mercurial personality. But there's no guile in her. She's absolutely straight. She expects that of others and she returns it."

Director Robert Altman, an old acquaintance, sums up succinctly: "The only problem with Sarah Miles is that she is so goddamned totally honest, it's more than most people can cope with."

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Sarah appears, with Gladys in tow, at Playboy's Hollywood offices a day or so later. Sarah's sizzling with excitement over a Stevie Wonder recording session she had attended the evening before. She settles behind a carrousel projector in a small dark room to study her Playboy photos and some stills from Sailor.

"That's not awfully good of me," Sarah observes at one point, "but I like it of Kris. He has such a beautiful body; you can see the sweat on his back." Or she may remark, unexpectedly, "The reason my tits stay up is that I never shave under my arms and have never in my life worn a bra." Then a typical afterthought: "Perhaps I should have waited until I was 80 to be in Playboy. Mightn't that have proved something?" she ventures mischievously. "I think I'll insist they let me do it again when the time comes."

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Lunch with Sarah and the inseparable Gladys means finding a restaurant where pets are welcome. Sarah suggests a small, nonchalant French bistro with a pleasant garden and under-the-table crawl space for Gladys. If caring for canines is a virtue, someone should erect a statue to Sarah, who declares that her friendship with England's late great philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was initiated in Chelsea years ago by her huge Pyrenean mountain dog named Addo. "People were frightened of Addo because he ran loose and detested anyone wearing a bowler hat. The residents decided they had to get me or my dog away from Hasker Street and Bertrand was the only one who came to our defense. He and Addo used to go for walks together. Then he started inviting us both to tea; he'd do that whole ritual with silver and beautiful china and very thin cucumber sandwiches. When I explained how ignorant I was, he just talked and I listened." Her look of waif-like innocence vanishes behind a worldly smile that makes it easy to imagine her in cozy tête-à-têtes with Great Men Through the Ages. You don't so readily picture her as the girl who goes home with Lassie, but out of loyalty to Addo, who refused to eat in her absence, Sarah once took what she calls "compassionate leave" from a film job in Madrid. And refused for the next 11 years to make a movie away from England, where stringent health laws complicate foreign travel for dogs. "When you choose a dog's life above anything else," she explains flatly, "you must expect some compromises."

She will blame neither Addo nor Gladys, however, for what she views as the erratic course of her career. "I'm totally at fault, because I don't peddle my wares, and that's part of the job. I don't mean ass licking, even, but just looking grand-- going out, being nice to the right people in the right place at the right time. I've never been able to do that."

Commanding attention, though, has seldom been a problem since the early Sixties, when she excited critical raves and, more than incidentally, launched a new era of screen nudity in The Servant. "That film really made a great stir in England. There was a naked scene in the bathroom, which had never been done before. If you're first at anything, like wearing the first miniskirt, you're stamped forever. The scene provoked criticism, especially from my parents, and their servants, who left because of it. My mother and father came to see me after a preview and said, 'Sarah, you've destroyed your career and us and everything we stand for.' At least they admitted they were wrong when the reviews came out."

Sarah waves away any hint that portraying a series of wildly passionate ladies pegs her as a kind of sexpot. "Passionate is the key word, not sexy. The most erotic scene I ever saw was in an old French film with Jean Gabin, where he was simply putting rolls into a basket." Her own mightiest struggle with screen sex, which left her emotionally ravaged, was the masturbation sequence in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace: "In a love scene with a man, at least you've got him there. But when you're alone with a camera and a crew and a mirror, trying to pull off something so intimate and erotic, which still has to be elegant, it's frighteningly lonely--like having an abortion with your eyes open."

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Eating, drinking, driving and rapping around L.A. with Sarah is a good trip for anyone who can maintain the pace. No matter how rapid the Miles per hour, there are pungent bits to grab in passing:

Her views of men, love and sex, she feels, are out of sync with the times. "I'm a romantic. And, funnily enough, I still believe in marriage. The hi-fuck-goodbye sort of thing is just not my way. If I were looking, which I'm not, I wouldn't be looking for a body ... because I've never seen a man and said, Wow, let's go to bed. It's the brain that blows my mind."

Her favorite actor, after Olivier, is the late kung-fu master Bruce Lee. "I don't mean I find him sexually attractive at all. I'd never heard of this man until one night we went to the local movie-house in Dartmouth, and there he was, like magic. There's one shot in Enter the Dragon, where the look on his face tells you he's just broken a man's neck, that is the most dramatic single moment I've ever seen on the screen."

Her favorite bad movie, and she adores a real clinker, is Cleopatra. "You know, there's Elizabeth as Cleopatra, and the way she says that line--'Tell Octavius to get his arm-eeze outta here'--it's just beautiful, a classic."

Her overwhelming ambition is to be a funny girl. "I always made people laugh at school and became a professional actress hoping to make people laugh. And there I was immediately in a weepy. I've never done a comedy. Except for The Sailor, I've always been stuck in historical clothes, too--playing those fucking trapped ladies."

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Back at her place on a Sunday, Sarah is in hip-huggers and a homespun shirt; also in a spiky temper that anyone would thoughtlessly arrive 30 minutes late. For a warm-up topic, how about discussing her widespread reputation as a practical joker? It's here--without warning--that she grabs a book and heaves ho, glancing it off the dome of an interviewer whose reflexes, worse luck, are a half beat too slow.

She's instantly contrite, gentle and solicitous: "I hope that didn't hurt. I never intentionally hurt anyone. Usually, I throw custard pies in people's faces. People are so barred up, with so much crap around them. If you catch them off guard, then look into their eyes, you can break right through. I did it on Cat Dancing with Marty Poll and he threw one back at me, which was excellent." As the story--corroborated by producer Poll--goes, he went to a party well prepared for Sarah's pie prank and they ended up wrestling on the floor in a friendly mess of pastry.

Sarah also has a subtler trick for cutting the phonies out of her inner circle: "I go around L.A. asking people-- mostly those who say they're interested in painting--if they have heard of this fantastic young painter who's coming up fast on the Left Bank. A fellow named Cabreu. Nine out of ten people pretend to know all about this remarkable gentleman--who doesn't exist."

Perhaps it's our unabashed ignorance of Cabreu, combined with a bump on the head, that convinces Sarah to let us in on the secret of the mysterious project she's been sweating over. It will be a one-woman (or one-woman, one-dog) show, mostly in freely rhymed verse, written and performed by Sarah Miles, who intends to premiere it on the stage in L.A. or New York. "Gladys will be onstage with me the entire time, but she's just an ordinary dog, thank God, who doesn't perform tricks. She'll simply act as my conscience and everything else."

Suddenly she's on her feet, rummaging through the coffee-table clutter. "It's going to be a challenge to my sound men, a challenge to the musicians, certainly a challenge to me, and an enormous challenge to Gladys." She pulls out a scrap of song ("Maybe I'm a whore ... maybe I'm a lady ..."), performs devastatingly accurate imitations (Edith Evans, Margaret Rutherford) and is finally persuaded to unveil a somewhat fuller sampling of things to come:

"I enter upstage right, dressed à la typical Las Vegas, or maybe like Oscar night. With breasts out for display, everything clinging to the right places, a wig, perfectly coifed. Then I begin, in verse, with my musicians. It goes:

"I'm on the Ultra--Ego trip--

I put my chips on me.

No time to wait to be fingered by Fate,

I'll handle my own destiny.

"The opening continues:

"I'd do it naked, but I'm afraid you'd hate it.

I'd do it in the bath, just to get a little laugh.

I'd hang in mid-air to make you stare,

I'd do any dare...."

Well, it sounds far better than it reads. In the flesh, Sarah can create soaring drama from a seed catalog. The new Sarah Miles may be seeking some kind of catharsis--a cynic might even call it psychological exhibitionism--but no one can question her sincerity and flair. Either before or after the upcoming Sarah and Gladys show, her plans include a film, Animals, for Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, whose icon-shattering Sweet Movie and WR--Mysteries of the Organism created some sharp controversy. Sarah will play a brittle, neurotic society matron who meets a West Indian workingman in an elevator. "He's a happy window cleaner and she's an unhappy rich lady. But it's like a fairy tale, in which his purity breaks through her dry shell of neurosis--there's far more to it than a good fuck."

She also hopes to make a feminist-sounding comedy called Tarzana with her talented brother, director Christopher Miles. "We'll switch the roles, of course. I'll be Tarzana, while Jane becomes this charming, rather effeminate young man who keeps his hair nice and complains about getting dirty. We don't know who will play the male part, but there are a good many Janes around.

"What I won't do is any movie that's just a packaged commercial deal. Unless there's something challenging in a role, I won't touch it." She pauses, bright-eyed, resolute. "I've been forever flaming along in life, sort of putting the actress in me here, the woman there, never joining the two. Now I want to put myself right. So on my deathbed I can say: Well, Sarah, you've had a good try."

That's Sarah Miles, characteristically having the last word. Or the next to last. One still wonders: Is she Wonder Woman, a dog's best friend, the movie world's brainiest little bad girl or, and perhaps most probably, a deep dish, displaced English eccentric masquerading in L.A. as a Hell's Angel?

In the pictures on these pages, Sarah Miles is trying to tell us something about herself, the man-woman relationship and today's changing sex roles. The poems that follow are her interpretations in verse of the pictures.

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Now I'm straddling time and sex and space--what an electric place to be,Floating in limbo, rooted in earth-- I'm neither Man nor Woman but me.

I am happy as Woman--free to lose, free to choose to be chaste.

Man stays linked by our pearls to the mystery of girls,

Yet while we pursue Woman's truth, Man is chased.

I've been there and back, man, narrowed the gap, that gap between master and slave ...

But don't ask me to tell you which is witch,

All my trips are a very close shave.