Reilly Remembers Hagen

When Uta Hagen died last week at the age of 84, The Star-Ledger asked me to write the obituary. That always means getting quotations from people with whom the deceased had worked.

I called Charles Nelson Reilly in the hope that I could reach him for a remembrance. Alas, I got his answering machine in California, left a message, and hoped for the best. I’ll never forget how, when I first met Reilly in 1988, he told me that one of his most memorable experiences in the theater was playing a role with no lines at all in a one-night 1980 flop called Charlotte. If that sounds strange, Reilly readily explained why the show was so significant to him: He shared the stage with Uta Hagen. I remember that he said he took the role just so he could see her perform from the closest vantage point possible.

About an hour later, Reilly called back and corroborated what I remembered. “It was really a one-woman show,” he said of Charlotte, “but there was a part for a man who would come on, walk around a little, and say nothing at all. I took it just to see her work eight times a week.” That was all I needed for a 600-word obituary, but if you’re at all familiar with Reilly, you know that he loves to talk about things that mean a great deal to him. He made me realize for the next hour — and I mean that literally — how much Uta Hagen meant to him. (Don’t forget that he was paying for the call.)

“Charlotte wasn’t a very good play,” he admitted, “but Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn and Paul Robeson and Robert Preston and Karl Malden and Walter Matthau worked with Miss Uta Hagen, and I wanted to, too. For opening night, she gave everyone involved a beautiful tote bag with the name of the show prominently on each of them. I’m still mad that I lost it while doing an episode of The Love Boat, and not just because it contained my toupée and I had to do the show bald.” (Reilly mentioned that Charlotte Rae was also in the cast of that Love Boat episode, but he wouldn’t point an accusing finger.)

Reilly first met Hagen when he enrolled in her acting class in 1950. “Tuesday at 11am is when all the new pupils met,” he recalled. “And the new pupils that year included Geraldine Page, Jason Robards, Frank Langella, Orson Bean, Peggy Cass, Barbara Barrie, Jack Lemmon, Kenneth Nelson, and Jerry Stiller, to whom Miss Hagen said, ‘Don’t sit in the back of the room. Come sit up here next to Anne Meara.’ By the way, the serious actors wouldn’t even talk to us who were comic actors. Wouldn’t even talk to us. And you should have heard them when they did a scene where they had to answer the telephone” — here, Reilly put on a most pretentious, pseudo-British accent — “‘Hal-loh-oh-oh?’ They all stunk! Every one of them! And Miss Hagen let them know it. ‘Just say hello, will you,’ she’d say with a voice that kept saying, ‘Truth! Truth!’ And they all learned how to do it.

“She wouldn’t allow criticism from the students,” Reilly told me. “I mean, someone would get up there and just be God-awful, and we’d have to bite our tongues and our lips to keep from yelling out, ‘You’re terrible! Just TER-rible!’ Miss Hagen wanted no criticism from us. She knew that the stage — and not the movies or television — was the place where an actor finds out exactly who he is, and she was going to help him find it. We worked so hard. When I’m teaching today, I can’t stand when kids say, ‘So, after six weeks or so, do we do a showcase?’ A showcase! They think they’re ready for a showcase! And let me tell you, Geraldine Page and Jason Robards came back to learn from Miss Uta Hagen long after they’d become famous. Every time Miss Hagen opened her mouth, we grew. She wasn’t displaying herself as a know-it-all, as so many teachers do. She was as dedicated as Annie Sullivan was to Helen Keller.”

In 1960, Hagen and Berghof asked Reilly to join HB Studios as a teacher. “That meant,” he recalled, “that I would sit at the same desk that she sat behind when she taught. I felt as if I should cover my face when I taught there. What right did I have to share the desk that Miss Uta Hagen used? And that went on for two years, until I realized she’d been complimenting me for what I’d been doing for some time and now I could relax. Because she wasn’t an actor; she was real. I mean, of course she was an actor, but you know what I mean — in the way that Jascha Heifetz wasn’t a violinist but he was real. She was the last of the great teachers. I now have a beautiful house in Beverly Hills, a yacht, several cars in the driveway, and all of this — and I mean ALL of this — happened because I studied with Miss Hagen.”

One time, Reilly invited Hagen to stay with him in that Beverly Hills home: “She didn’t like it here. She wouldn’t even change her watch to West Coast time. She’d say that we were going to be late for something because it was 4:30 and I’d have to yell at her, ‘It’s only 1:30! 1:30!’ When I showed her the lemon trees out back, she’d say, ‘Oh, but those aren’t real lemons, are they?’ She was used to the lemons she bought in Balducci’s. Nothing in California seemed real to her.”

His fondest memory of Hagen? “About 10 years ago, I called her and said, ‘Let’s go see Il Trovatore at the Met. I’ll get house seats, my treat.’ Now, she hated to leave the house but she said okay, even though I was going to pick her up in a limo that was chauffeured for me by this game show I was doing at the time and she absolutely hated stuff like that. Well, she lived on Washington Square and the limo started going down Fifth Avenue. Suddenly, at Tenth Street, they wouldn’t let us go through. It was all barricaded because it was Halloween and they were having that big parade in the Village. And I don’t know why I said to the cop, ‘But I promised Miss Hagen that I’d pick her up!’ He said, ‘Miss Hagen! Oh, that’s different.’ And he arranged a police escort for me to get right up to her house. As we approached, I called her on the phone and said, ‘Look out your window, you’re not going to believe this.’ And we had the escort all the way up to the restaurant on 58th Street, where they wouldn’t let us pay because someone there had studied with her. And then we went to the opera, and when they saw I was with her, they wouldn’t charge me for the tickets. And at intermission, when we went to the bar, two students of hers were working there and wouldn’t let us pay for the drinks. And when we went to get the limo, it was filled — I mean filled on the floor and the seat — with flowers because the limo driver had called his sister, who just happened to be Kate Mulgrew, who insisted he get her flowers. Then we went to The Tunnel, this club where they had a fabulous light show that I wanted her to see, but the room was closed for Halloween — until they saw I was with Miss Hagen and they opened it just for us and did the show for the two of us. And then we went to the Limelight, and when I tried to pay they threw money back at me because they knew Miss Hagen. I’m telling you, from 5pm that night till 3am in the morning, I didn’t pay a cent — all because I was with Miss Hagen.

“No,” Reilly said immediately after finishing his amazing story. “That isn’t my favorite memory of her. My favorite memory is that, when her HB Studio was condemned by the city for fire code violations and some such things, her pupils and Herbert’s pupils heard about it and went out and raised money from doctors and lawyers and everyone else and got it all fixed up and bought the building for them. Bought the building! Both of them couldn’t believe it, but that’s how much people loved both of them. How much we all loved them.”

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]