Who Is The Rake: Burt Lancaster
Burt Lancaster’s battle cry was, ‘Keep looking for truth and originality’. He was faithful to its meaning throughout his deified Hollywood existence — even if it made him a mercurial talent.
In 1968 Burt Lancaster starred in a film called The Swimmer. It’s the story of Ned Merrill, a Connecticut suburbanite who embarks on the quixotic quest to make his way home, one hot afternoon, via a procession of his neighbours’ backyard pools. Lancaster spends the entire film clad in Speedos, thus not only keeping wardrobe costs down but also ostensibly doing nothing to dampen the esteemed critic Pauline Kael’s assessment of him as “a prime specimen of hunkus Americanus”. But, as the dives and lengths accumulate, it transpires that all is not hunky-dory in NedWorld: he’s hiding a dark secret, and the atmosphere, along with the martini- swigging peers he hails along the way, gets colder and less cocktail hour benign until, at the film’s climax, he’s hugging his wracked body in a tempest, unsure of ever finding safe harbour. “Burt Lancaster is 52,” wrote John Cheever, the author of the short story on which the film was based. “Lithe, comely and somewhat disfigured by surgical incisions, he looks both young and old, masterful and tearful.”
As a repressed bisexual alcoholic suburbanite himself, Cheever knew more than most about the amount of water you have to frenziedly tread in order to keep up appearances. But he’d hit on the essential quality that Lancaster brought to his best performances, characterised by another critic as “brawny melancholy”. Lancaster had a water phobia — he’d hired the coach of the U.C.L.A. men’s water polo team to train him through the shoot — but he moves throughout the film, even in extremis, with a cool, limpid grace, like the acrobat he once was (only Cary Grant and Lancaster’s good friend Kirk Douglas, fellow ex-acrobats both, could match him for seductive sinuosity). Lancaster thrived on his paradoxes — the near-smile masking righteous wrath, the quiet croon making the violent threats all the more blood-freezing — and he used them to great effect in films such as 1960’s Elmer Gantry, where his tub-thumping revivalist preacher won him his only Oscar; 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, in which he played a remorse-stricken German accused of war crimes; and 1962’s Birdman of Alcatraz, based on the life of the murderer who became a celebrated ornithologist during his half-century on death row.
Lancaster’s characters, whatever their transgressions, may have garnered your sympathy, but they never asked for your pity. “Don’t waste your time grieving over me,” the Birdman advises a prison guard. “When it’s cut, it’s cut.” And Lancaster the tumbler always kept the deft sideways move in mind. “If you look back on my career, you’ll see I never got stuck in a mould,” he said. “I was always trying to refine ways to use my talent and try something different. Once the public decide what you are, you might as well give up trying to be anything else.”
His characters, whatever their transgressions, may have garnered your sympathy, but they never asked for pity.
Many of today’s young actors are obliged to build the bodies of athletes; Lancaster was an athlete who fashioned himself into an actor. He was born Burton Stephen Lancaster in New York in 1913, the son of a postal worker; the family inhabited a railroad flat in East Harlem, and he often said he might have grown up to be either a cop or a criminal (his brother chose the former course while a lot of his childhood buddies ended up in Sing Sing) if it hadn’t been for athletics and the public library. Already 6’2” by the time he was 14, he won an athletic scholarship to New York University, where he excelled at basketball, boxing, track and gymnastics while burying his nose in books and entertaining the notion of being an opera singer in his downtime. Then, two years in, according to Lancaster’s protégé, the director Sydney Pollack, “he ran away to join the circus”.
In fact, Lancaster teamed up with his boyhood friend Nick Cravat to form an acrobatic duo specialising in the horizontal bar. They started with Kay Bros., on $3 and three meals a day, and, over the next five years, glide-swung and pull-overed their way up to Barnum & Bailey, the pinnacle of the circus world. “But it didn’t feel quite right,” Lancaster later recalled. “I felt something was lacking. Hell, I wanted to talk, not just swing.”
