A Man in Full

Live long enough and people will forget who you are or, worse, who you were. Kate Buford has gathered the small bits and large pieces that constitute the life and work of one of the great post-World War II movie stars, and she has written a fine and intelligent book that is doubly good because it is realistic without being salacious. A model of what a celebrity’s biography should be, it will ensure that we don’t forget Burton Stephen Lancaster.

In 72 films that began in 1946 with “The Killers” and ended in 1989 with “Field of Dreams” (he appeared in half a dozen television movies and miniseries that aired through 1991), Burt Lancaster played, among other generally not solid citizens, a predatory army sergeant (“From Here to Eternity”), a laconic Wyatt Earp (“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”), a reformed alcoholic with an emotional tripwire (“Come Back, Little Sheba”), a hypocritical revivalist (“Elmer Gantry”), a renegade Indian (“Apache”), an aristocratic Nazi (“Judgment at Nuremberg”), a murderer in solitary confinement (“Birdman of Alcatraz”), a circus aerialist (“Trapeze”), a monstrous gossip columnist (“Sweet Smell of Success”) and a shrewdly dotty oil magnate (“Local Hero”). He would have given anything to play Don Corleone in “The Godfather” and turned down $1 million from MGM to play Ben-Hur because, although he had been a self-proclaimed atheist for decades, he found the movie “a belittling picture of Christianity as I understand it.” More practically, he might also have feared getting lost in so grand an epic. “Why,” he asked William Wyler, the film’s director, “do you want to do this piece of crap?”

Lancaster was born in New York in 1913 and led a hardscrabble city life in East Harlem; he later summed up his youth as being “cold and scrounging for jobs” and living in mortal fear of his mother, Lizzie, a 5-foot, 9-inch beauty turned by five children into 250 pounds of volatility on feet. She would be the great influence in his life for much good but also for the lashing temper that would suddenly engulf him like a thunderhead and then leave him apologetic and wondering how he got so out of control. John Frankenheimer, who directed “The Train” in 1964, a black and white high-explosive adventure that is the mother of the “Die Hard” and “Lethal Weapon” school of films, watched Lancaster blow up at the production manager “to the point where I thought he was going to kill him. And after it was over, he just held his head in his hands and said, ‘You know, I’m going to die of a stroke. I know it. My mother died of a stroke.’ ”

Yet Lancaster was a man of eminent fairness. Buford, a commentator for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” writes that “[u]ntil the end of his life he would credit Union Settlement House on East 104th Street as the single most important influence, after his mother, on his childhood and youth,” and he was a generous financial supporter until his death.

The Protestant Irish Lancasters regularly attended Union’s affiliated Church of the Son of Man, whose pastor, Harris Ely Adriance, turned up time and again in interviews the actor gave over the years. One Sunday, Lancaster recalled, Adriance stopped his sermon to welcome and seat a black woman who had come to the church for the first time, then reminded the congregation “[n]ot to be blinded, not to be controlled by prejudice, not to be warped, not to be unreasonable, these are the things for the spiritual man to battle for.”

Freedom, Buford says, became Lancaster’s secular religion, and he was mindful throughout his life of the pastor’s injunction. He was an early and staunch supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and in 1969 worked hard for Los Angeles city Councilman Tom Bradley in his first (and only unsuccessful) run for mayor, against the incumbent Sam Yorty, who predicted that the election of a black mayor would bring not only more riots like those in Watts in 1965 but also “militant extremists” who would take over the city. And he cited Lancaster as an example of one.

As Buford puts it, Lancaster’s “central ‘simple’ belief [was] that the Bill of Rights was what ‘made this country unique’ by empowering the individual while setting limits on government.” This belief led him to work for years for the ACLU and caused others to suspect him of communist sympathies. It also got him on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” But enough about his good works, save to say that he was a loyal friend, and on to his good looks.

For Lancaster was staggeringly handsome, at least after he was about 13; until then, his youthful short stature left him an easy if unintentional target for automobiles that ran through the street games he and his friends played. He was hit eight times, once by a taxi that knocked him 30 feet; another collision cost him his lower teeth when he went through the windshield. But by his late teens he was 6 feet 1, with blond hair and blue eyes, a lean, muscled, beautifully coordinated body and a talent for performing on the trapeze and bars. With dental caps and post-war stardom came the sobriquet “Mr. Muscles and Teeth.” He had a panther’s presence: graceful, sensuous and, behind the beauty, dangerous. Beneath the purr of his voice was a growl.

“To grow up in America without dreaming about the circus,” he once wrote, “is not to have lived.” He quit New York University and in 1933 joined a second-rate circus. During the next 10 years, he toured with it and others, married June Ernst, the daughter of a prominent circus family (the union was over in three years, but it took a decade to get around to the divorce), did some vaudeville and eventually found his way to the Federal Theater Project. He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and, because of his experience, he was assigned to the Army Service Forces, whose mission ranged from delivering equipment and supplies to providing morale-building entertainment for the troops. Lancaster’s delivering lines onstage instead of doing acrobatic routines built him the bridge he would need to make the transition from the circus to the movies. The oft-told story is that he got his big break in 1945 when he was spotted in an elevator by a talent scout for the Broadway producer Irving Jacobs, who had a part to fill in his new play, “A Sound of Hunting,” which Lancaster did so well that offers came in from seven studios.

He met Norma Anderson, his second wife (there would be three) while he was serving in Italy and she showed up with a USO troupe. They had two boys and three girls, all of whom he taught to walk on their hands. Despite a steady intake of steaks, Camels and martinis, he continually honed his agility along with his muscles, and his upper body strength was Bunyan-esque. During a flight from New York to Los Angeles when he was 59, he reached over two seats and with one arm plucked a heart attack victim up and out into the aisle. During filming, stuntmen were for lesser men. Whether swashbuckling in “The Flame and the Arrow” (1950) or doing aerial somersaults in “Trapeze” (1956), Lancaster did it all.

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He was a sexual magnet and did not shy away from his attraction to women, but as his longtime mistress Jackie Bone says, “Burt was a guy who was loved by men. Men loved him almost better than women. Women liked to use him, put notches in their belt. But men, real men, loved him.” Rumors persisted for decades that Lancaster was bisexual, and his early involvement in support of AIDS research, before it was professionally helpful to participate, started more. Buford, the first biographer to have the cooperation of Lancaster’s third wife and widow, Susan, and many of his friends, gives the rumors credence but leans more toward the broader theory that he was, simply, sexual. Opportunity didn’t knock on his door: It beat it down.

A man of action, he also had a nice wit (he called “The Swimmer” in 1968 “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in swimming trunks”) and a contemplative side. He read constantly--a book a day after a speed-reading course--and loved opera, Brahms, Bach and “Mozart the sublime.” He became captivated by the intricacies of chamber music later in life, about the same time that playing bridge became more a pleasant pastime than a gunfight.

Lancaster was among the first and arguably the most successful of actors who became independent producers. With his partner Harold Hecht, he formed Hecht- Lancaster Productions (later Hecht-Hill-Lancaster) which turned out films with and without the star. Among the latter was “Marty” (1955), which won the Oscar for best picture. In an era when taste meant something, the HL script staff included at one time or another: Paddy Chayefsky, Clifford Odets, J.P. Miller, Ernest Lehman, John Gay, Philip Leacock, Julius Epstein and Ray Bradbury. But Hollywood memories are short. Only weeks after Lancaster’s death in 1994 a newspaper article about the rise of actors’ production companies in the ‘90s cited “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” produced by Michael Douglas in 1975, as one of the few films to win an Oscar for best picture produced by an actor who did not star in it or direct it. Lancaster and “Marty” were not mentioned.

Lancaster received four best-actor Academy Award nominations. The first was for the role of Sgt. Warden in “From Here to Eternity” (1953). Its famous kissing-on-the-beach scene with Deborah Kerr was scandalous at the time because, gasp, she was on top. He won for his portrayal of the charlatan preacher in “Elmer Gantry” (1960) but not for “Birdman of Alcatraz” (1962). Nominated for his portrayal of Lou Pasco, the aging numbers runner with a chance for glory in “Atlantic City” (1981), he lost to another giant making a comeback, Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond.” “Atlantic City” sums up a lifetime of Lancaster’s work and shows, as his friend Roddy McDowall said, his ability to “discard what has defined him and change.” No change is greater than his erotic interplay with Susan Sarandon (whose father, Capt. Phillip Leslie Tomalin, had kept Burt and Norma out of trouble for missing a curfew a few nights after they met in Italy during World War II) in this movie. It was a role whose nuance he didn’t immediately grasp. Used to being the seducer all his life, Sarandon says he found it “very difficult . . . to understand, to embrace initially, that she gave herself to him.” Buford tells us that he was also not thrilled to be reminded of Sarandon’s father’s help those many years ago. “It only reinforced the fact that he was old enough to be her father.”

Lancaster was half prescient the day he held his head and predicted how he would die. In 1990, visiting a sick friend in the hospital, he had a massive cerebral stroke that slowly strangled his body but not his mind. Susan Martin Lancaster, whom he met in 1985 and married in 1989, tended to him as his great physical presence wasted away in their Century City apartment overlooking the Hillcrest Country Club, where Lancaster had spent years trying to master golf, the one athletic endeavor that eluded him. In October 1994, he had a fatal heart attack. For a man who flew through the air and through life with the greatest of ease for 77 years, his last four must have been hell.

Lancaster’s final film was “Field of Dreams” in 1989, in which he played Doc Graham, the old man who in his youth had briefly been a rookie on the 1919 Chicago White Sox. In Lancaster’s last scene in the movies, Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) calls to Graham, “Hey, rookie! You were good.” This definitive and entertaining book reminds us that Burt Lancaster was even better.