She called herself "a daughter of Troy" but her upstate New York hometown in is not where I located her. "Hello," said the voice, the one that was supposed to say, in a guarded tone, "The so and so agency." What kind of a discount outfit is this, I wondered, and why would anyone as big as an Oscar winner belong to it? "Um...," I hesitated, "I'm looking for whoever represents Maureen Stapleton." "This is she," continued the voice. She? Not her agent? Not her manager? She?
I realize now that it was pure Maureen: unpretentious, direct, approachable.
I intimated a few details about the shoot, unleashing a torrent of idiosyncratic concerns: "How far is Ottawa" - our Canadian location - "from Massachusetts?" - her living quarters. "Will I have to fly? I won't fly you know. What about elevators? Will there be elevators?"
"Maureen," her old friend Eli Wallach explained to me a few weeks after this exchange, "refuses to leave the house. All she does all day is sit and watch 'Jeopardy.' You want her? Tell her she can do a scene with Alex Trebek."
I'd wish I'd known all this while I was still trying to sign her. So little did the compromises I offered assuage her neuroses that in no time, there I was, resorting to the oldest trick in the book: the ego-stroke. I raved about the breath of fresh air she brought to Woody Allen's stifling Interiors and the great proletariat panache that marked her Emma Goldman in Reds. But polite "Thank you"s were all I received.
"At least send me the script, okay?," she concluded, exhibiting some spark - albeit a small one - of enthusiasm. "Of course," I answered, but by then I knew. She had played her last role.
Still, in my mind's eye, there she is, on our set: her broad, expressive face enveloped in a scarf, playing the role that would have been perfect for her, the no-nonsense Italian widow, holding camera, crew and co-stars in awe, speaking plain and being charming.
