Elaine Stritch on Life, Sex and Death
Elaine Stritch built her Broadway career playing brash and bawdy characters.
By Erik Olsen onJuly 17, 2014. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
It’s common to describe a talent as singular, one of a kind or larger than life. And yet those words seem strictly accurate, albeit a bit flimsy, when applied to Elaine Stritch.
Onstage and off, Ms. Stritch was strikingly blunt about needing to be loved by an audience, although in her later cabaret performances, her first words might be how terrified she was to be up there. Perhaps more than any other performer, she embodied the contradictions that churn in the hearts of so many actors and singers: Her constitution seemed to be equal parts self-assurance and self-doubt, arrogance and vulnerability. A need to be admired did constant combat with a nagging fear of being rejected.
But unlike most performers, Ms. Stritch never felt the necessity (or had the filter) to mask either the egotism or the fragility, in public or in private. She made the complications of her own personality part of her art, indeed the wellsprings of it. And in acknowledging the depth of her needs, she touched a universal chord.
Elaine Stritch: 1925-2014
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
For evidence of her singularity, consider that the greatest role she ever played was the demanding one of Elaine Stritch, in the blazing one-woman show “Elaine Stritch: At Liberty,” in which she related, in sardonic song and salty story, the turbulent arc of her life and career on Broadway and in the West End of London: the boozy all-nighters with Judy Garland, the emotional tussle with a young Marlon Brando, the privilege of having no less than Noël Coward write a musical for her.
Nakedly honest, and practically naked — she wore just black tights and a man’s shirt, referring to herself at one point as “an existential problem in tights” — Ms. Stritch gave a performance that set an unmatched standard for solo shows about the unlikely breaks, tough knocks and heady but dangerous highs of life in showbiz.
While looking her age, she somehow still seemed ageless, as well as tireless and fearless. In a performance that brought audiences to their feet not just out of dutiful affection but from electrified excitement, Ms. Stritch showed off her deep scars as casually as she recalled the high points of her career.
She sang Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from the musical “Company,” with the same dust-dry acerbity, and raging emotional force, that she brought to it three decades before. With the same inimitable phrasing she used to draw out the comic bite in a lyric, Ms. Stritch delved into anecdotes about the darkest aspects of her life, including her long battle with alcoholism.
This defining performance came when Ms. Stritch was well into her 70s, at an age when many actors retire, or settle for small parts, or fade into obsolescence. There would be none of that for Ms. Stritch, who found herself a whole new audience a few years later, when she portrayed the ego-chomping mother of Alec Baldwin’s character in “30 Rock.” Only at the very last, when her memory began to fade, and she seemed to lose some of her savor for performing, did Ms. Stritch move back to Michigan, where she grew up.
And then, of course, she made a two-act drama of her retirement, saying in an interview last summer that a) she wasn’t sure it was a good idea, and b) she wasn’t really retired, just sort of resting after her busy life in New York.
Until the end, she continued to captivate, to amuse, to fascinate, occasionally to frustrate. In her last Café Carlyle performances, she sang just a handful of songs and mostly talked, with no real focus, about whatever she wanted to talk about; no one seemed to mind.
What united her classic performances, in character or as herself, was a commitment to digging into the truth in the texts she was given. She would use that craggy rasp of a voice to underscore the almost stoic resignation in a song like Mr. Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” or turn his “Every Day a Little Death,” also from “A Little Night Music,” into a grimly honest little prose poem shorn entirely of the rippling musical accompaniment that somewhat softens its sting.
One of the most arresting, and unlikely, moments in “Elaine Stritch: At Liberty” came when she performed the song “Something Good,” originally a love duet from the movie of “The Sound of Music” — a seemingly sugary tune one would not naturally associate with her hard-bitten, wised-up persona. She recast it as a yearning love song performed to the audience, whose admiration she needed, and appreciated, but probably never ceased to question. The lyrics are faintly imploring:
Nothing ever comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.
Ms. Stritch sang the words with a quiet gravity that was strangely affecting. Even having returned to Broadway at 76, more triumphant than ever, she still seemed to wonder if she was worthy of our admiration. She was.
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