RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN
GUEST 

ON THE LARRY KING LIVE 1/3
NOVEMBER 3O, 1996.

 

 
Larry King:  It’s our great pleasure to have as our special guest for the entire program tonight on Larry King Weekend, Richard Chamberlain. What a path, what a swath he has cut in American entertainment. On the stage, in movies, on television. Richard Chamberlain, a lifetime Californian who now lives in Hawaii, whose new project is “River Made to Drown In”. Are you doing that now?
Richard:  We just  finished it, last Saturday night. A most amazing experience. 

Larry:  A River Made to Drown In

Richard:  Yeah.

Larry:  Are you the star? Are you the producer? Are you…

Richard:  I’m one of the stars. It’s a very ensemble piece. It’s a small movie. Low budget. Independent. It’s one of my two favorite jobs I’ve ever had.

Larry:  No kidding!

Richard:  Yeah. This kid, he’s 26, I think, directing it—James Merendino.

Larry:  Who else is in it?

Richard:  Well… (laughs, shuffles to look through jacket pockets)

Larry:  It’s like a small movie.

Richard:  Yeah. It’s a small movie. It’s a feature film.

Larry:  A River Made to Drown In-- Why is it one of your two favorites, then I’ll ask what the other one was.

Richard:  Because everyone is doing it because they want to do it. It’s a wonderful script. There’s no money involved. Nobody got paid much. So everybody is doing it for the right reasons.

Larry:   A classic labor of love.

Richard:  Yeah. And it’s a wonderful part. Very very different from anything I’ve ever done before. I play a guy who’s about my age, in his late 50’s—I’m actually past 60—who is dying of AIDS and comes back to his old Santa Monica Boulevard haunts to leave a legacy to the two hustlers who he’s fallen in love with in the past. It’s crazed, right? It’s some departure…

Larry:  Is it an original…?

Richard:  Yes, it’s an original script. It’s a wonderful script and a wonderful, wonderful movie. As far as I know—it hasn’t been put together yet. But I loved doing it. There was a kind of freedom about it. 

Larry:  But you don’t take small movies normally, do ya?

Richard:  Oh, I would. Oh, happily. Yeah.

Larry:  In other words, if you like the part…

Richard:  If I like the part, I’ll do anything.

Larry:  What was your other favorite?

Richard:  The other was a play at the Public Theatre in New York. It was written by Tom Babe, directed by Robert Alan Ackerman. It was called, “Fathers & Sons” and I played Wild Bill Hickok. Dixie Carter played Calamity Jane. Have you ever had Dixie on the show?

Larry:  A long time ago.

Richard:  Yeah, she’s great! We had amazing chemistry together and it was about this rotten kid…I’m Wild Bill and I’m very past my prime and he comes to kill me. He’s sort of a bastard son of mine. 
And there were songs…
 

Act Two scene 6 

Bill: That much is true and he sings............ 

This was a man, I take it, 

With pluck enough to make it 

And never feelings and fun; 

But he had to get so old 

With no tast of the real gold 

And now his game is done... 
 
 

And here lies one of many 

Who seemed to have like any other 

Let himself contract 

To cards and drink and silly talk 

And a shuffling to his walk... 

A certain shuffling to his walk. 
 

Worn out were I find it 

Without brains enough to mind it 

Till even feeling was lost; 

And you weren't enough the man 

To bluff a loosing hand 

And so you pay the cost... 
 

Till nothing was a real fact 

Your every act was less exact 

You came to matter less, 

Your cards and drink and foolish fun... 
 

Your old drifter and poker bum. 

Amen, amen, the time had come 

The time had come 
 

Someone else:
 

Your hand's folded, the talking 's done 

Amen, amen, the time had come 

The time had come 

Bill: You old drifter and poker bum, 

Amen, amen

Larry:  Your two favorite roles are generally roles that the public would not say they know. Well, actually they don’t know the new one at all.

Richard:  Yeah, yeah.

Larry:  You grew up…Let’s go back to the Chamberlain career, because you’ve touched so many bases…you grew up here, right?

Richard:  Yes I did. I was born in L.A.

Larry:  And wanted to be an artist, right?

Richard:  Well, I really wanted to be an actor. I was kidding myself about the art. I was so, almost  catatonic, with a kind of lack of confidence when I was young, that I never thought I could make it as an actor. I spent most of my time in the drama department, but I said—here’s how practical I am—I said, “Well, if I can’t make it as an actor, I’ll be a painter”.

Larry:  Two professions that are highly employable.

Richard:  Yes, right, right!

Larry:  You went to Beverly Hills High.

Richard:  So, I went to Beverly High and Pomona College, which is a great little college in Claremont, California. And my senior year in college I suddenly had a little collegiate success in a Shaw play. 
And I thought, Ah Hah! I can do this. And so I threw art out the window and decided to become an actor.

Larry:  You like being other people, then. You like that…

Richard:  Yes, that was my main motivation in the beginning because I didn’t like myself very much and it was great fun and much more free to be someone else. That’s not my motivation now, because I’m much more comfortable with myself.

Larry:  But you trained enough out of it to still get as much kick out of it, or not?

Richard:  Oh, yeah. Well, I went through a period, just after doing My Fair Lady in New York in ’93, when I thought, “I really don’t want to do this anymore”. 

Because I had been pretty pre-meditated about my acting; not very spontaneous—I thought things out ahead of time. And it was hard work. And then after that, I did a little movie in Bulgaria, strictly for the money because I thought, “nobody will ever see this” and the offer was terrific, and I didn’t like the script very much and so I went over to do this and there was a director named Temi Lopez, a little guy from Venezuela. 
And we got on right away; he was very sweet. And we had done a few rehearsals and things and he came up to me and he said,” Richard, Richard”, he said, “you are so good-looking. You are so charming. Will you please stop acting and just be yourself?”. 
And I thought, What a curious idea! That’s what I should have been doing all along, y’know, isn’t that what actors do. Don’t act. 
Be yourself as the character. Listen and react. That’s what all acting teachers talk about and I had never been able to do it very much…
Larry:  Are you saying you’ve never done that?

Richard:  No, no. I’m not saying I never did it. I’m saying I often didn’t do it. And, consequently, acting was very hard work for me. 

Larry:  Let’s go back. We all got to know you through Kildare? You were not known before Kildare.

Richard:  No. I had done maybe twelve parts on television before.

Larry:  Where you guested.

Richard:  Guested, yeah. 

Larry:  How did you get that role?

Richard:  Well, that’s an interesting story. There was an executive…

Larry:  This was, like, 1960, right?

Richard:  Yeah, 1960. There was an executive at MGM, who I had been in high school with. His name is George LeMare and I didn’t know him really; he had been student body president and stuff like that. Well, anyway, as time passed, I went in the army, I went to college, he went to MGM. And then, when I got out of college and got out of the army, I got my picture in the Player’s Guide and all that stuff and started looking for work. And he saw my picture in there one day and had remembered me and thought, Oh, I wonder what this kid’s all about. And so, he got me an interview because they were trying to cast a series called The Paradise Kid, a western. It was like the last of the westerns. Westerns were on the way out at that time. So, I came out for an interview and they liked me and I did a pilot of this show, which never sold. But, then, when Kildare came up, about a year later…

Larry:  A famous movie series before, I mean, Kildare was a known…

Richard:  Oh yeah, there had been twelve very well-known movies. They had been trying and trying and trying to cast it and couldn’t. They’d seen everybody in town and they pulled out this old test I had done for The Paradise Kid and they thought, That’s what we’re looking for!. I don’t know why they thought that, but, that’s what they thought.

Larry:  Who was the older man on the show?

Richard:  Raymond Massey.

Larry:  Oh, what a combination, the two of you!

Richard:  We were wonderful together. I loved him. And he really liked me. And the reason he approved me—he had approval of the part—was that, my second job was a Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 
I played one of Ray’s sons. And we had gotten on very well, so, he said Okay.

Larry:  How long did Kildare run?

Richard:  Five years.

Larry:  So, Kildare was the big break?

Richard:  Oh, absolutely. An incredible…and it came rather early, too.

Larry:  How were you able, though, after five years of that—a very successful television show—to break the mold and become doing so many other things—Shakespeare, 

films, mini-series’, and so on. You did Thorn Birds, I guess the most successful ever done.

Richard:  It was one of them, yeah.

Larry:  How did you break a mold…I mean, Vince Edwards was Ben Casey no matter where he was.

Richard:  It wasn’t easy because, once you’ve been in peoples’ living rooms for five years, and become part of the family, they don’t want you to be anything else.

Larry:  You’re Dr. Kildare!

Richard:  Yeah, I was Dr. Kildare, period. And the business, I think, probably would have been hesitant to put me in anything else. There were other series offers and things. But I had this hunch, that if I went to England…I met, at Ray Massey’s house once for lunch, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and he looked at me and he said,”You know, you have become a star before you know how to act”. He didn’t mean it unkindly; it was very true. And so, I thought, I gotta go to England and get in a rep company or something and do my homework, I need my basic training.

Larry:  Here’s a big star coming over to learn…

Richard:  Right. So, I went to England…First I did Petula, a film with Richard Lester, which was an all-English crew, all-English people…

Larry:  I loved that one, that was a funny movie.

Richard:  It was a good movie. And I got a sense of England partly through them. Then I finally went and thought I’d find a coach and join one of the great acting schools or something. And I got a part right away—A Portrait of A Lady—my first mini-series. It was a six-hour British mini-series of a Henry James novel, playing Ralph Touchett. 

It was a magnificent experience. Wonderful director. Wonderful actors. The press said, “What do you know! The kid can act!”. Surprise, surprise. Peter Dewes, at Birmingham Rep saw the show and he was on the sofa with his wife watching it and he said, I think that boy can play Hamlet. Actually, they needed some box office at the time, really; they had other motives. So, he approached me about playing Hamlet at Birmingham Rep. I did it, but, I turned it down because I had several months to make up my mind and I studied with everybody I could find, and they said, “Dick, don’t do this, don’t do it”. You know, I had never played Shakespeare before except five lines in King Lear. So at the…I turned it down…at the absolute eleventh hour, I woke up in the middle of the night—this is true—going,”I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to do it!”, like somebody was shaking me. And so I called my agent next day and I said,” If they’ll still let me do it, I’ll do it, if Peter will work with me for weeks before we get into rehearsals.”. Which he did. I went back and he was directing Hadrian the Seventh in New York at the time, a wonderful play, and he agreed and we worked in his garage…

Larry:  How many performances did you do?

Richard:  We played for about six weeks, I guess.

Larry:  Did you enjoy it?

Richard:  After I got into it, yes. The opening night was a time of such terror, I can not tell you!

Larry:  It’s the hardest role ever written.

Richard:  It’s pretty hard. I couldn’t bend my knees. I was walking around like this, my voice going all up here. Furthermore, I didn’t think the critics were coming all the way from London. They all came. I found out the day before. 

Larry:  Did you get wrapped?

Richard:  No. Funly enough they came for blood. They really came for blood—“Who is this pretentious little person from television playing one of our great parts?”—and they actually took me seriously. They didn’t say I was great. But they took me seriously, which is the most I could have hoped for.

Larry:  The difficulty in that part is you could play it a thousand ways, and all be right, or all be wrong, right?

Richard:  Yes, yes. Nobody has found a definitive Hamlet, I’m sure. It’s a wonderful part. Full of mystery.

Larry:  Then you appeared in a movie, right? Playing who, Octavius, right? Who did you play in Hamlet?

Richard:  Octavius. No, that was Julius Caesar with Charleton Heston and a lot of people.

Larry:  Did you enjoy that too?

Richard:  Yeah, it was fun. I don’t think it was a good film.

Larry:  Did you enjoy Shakespeare?


William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Richard:  Yes! Extremely.

Larry:  What makes him different?

Richard:  He has a profound heart. I mean, he really knows human beings, he really knows the human condition.  And he writes about it with such majestic poetry that is so right. It is so right-on. It is so wise. That when you say this stuff…First of all, it’s easy to learn because there’s no other way to say the things he said—you can’t substitute anything. It’s not easy to play. You’ve gotta learn how to handle your energy so you can handle these huge arcs of speech, and make sense of it.

Larry:  Al Pacino’s, “Looking for Richard” (1996 movie), you can really get a sense of it. Great movie.

Richard:  Fabulous movie. Fabulous movie.

Larry:  But that’s the sense of what Shakespeare is. He confounds you.

Richard:  Yes. And you dig and dig and dig and it’s endlessly rich. 
It’s just the most wonderful material.

Larry:  Therefore to play, must be a hoot.

Richard:  Once you get a hold of it, it’s wonderful. It carries you with it, this wonderful wisdom and poetry.

Larry:  So, you’re in England. You’re doing all this, what brings you back?

Richard:  I lived there for four-and-a-half years. I loved every second of it, I made wonderful friends, I had wonderful work opportunities there. But I suddenly…suddenly, American producers were saying things like, “Do you think you can play an American part?”. Because, having lived there, I sort of got this fake British accent, and so, I thought it was time to go home. Also, I felt like a treasured guest at a club that would never quite be a member. I had wonderful friends there. Wonderful times. But I would never be a Brit. 
I was an American and I thought, It’s time to go home.

Larry:  And you just picked up and went home, or did ya have a job waiting?

Richard:  I can’t remember, I may have.

Larry:  How did Richard Chamberlain get to be Mini-Series King? 
If there was a major novel turned into a four-day mini-series, you were the star.

NEXT PART TWO