So many people, even those that had never met the man himself, have mentioned in the past few weeks feeling like they had just lost a father in Roy Dotrice. I guess all the best storytellers and artists have many children not their own, born of thoughts and emotions. They grow together nurtured by all the shared noticings that are what life is and what brings art to life. We are all in each other’s stories and when such a life comes full circle it is neither lost nor ended so long as those stories continue to be shared. Memories retold live on to become part of still other lives. It is in that spirit that I endeavor here to honor the Roy Dotrice I love.
His daughter, Yvette, on a BBC Radio tribute was quoted as describing her father as spending every day of his life “as if it were Christmas Day.” I was lucky enough to observe first hand how apt a description this was even though 95 percent of the time it was at the other end of a phone line or a letter. The very first time Roy and I spoke over the phone it was about holiday lights and being snowbound. His very last missive was a Christmas card. It was of a Santa walking away, waving. It was cheerful enough but it reminded me all too well of a postcard he’d sent from a Maine vacation with his daughter Karen and her husband. Roy had just lost his beloved wife Kay and that postcard had two very empty, very lonely camp chairs facing away overlooking an equally empty lake and distant trees. Not his usual funny, isn’t-this-outrageous kind of postcard at all. This wasn’t his usual splendidly scenic Christmas card either. Santa seemed definitely to be waving ‘good-bye.’
I may not have liked what it portended but I still needed to hold that one last Christmas card in my hands once again. I thought I knew exactly the safe place where I’d put it. But it wasn’t there! I tore the house apart for one day and into the next looking for that goodbye, but what was found instead were hardly that.
Fingerless gloves his character wore in the TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” press photos, scripts, an abandoned play about Shakespeare and some of the music I’d hoped to write for it, notes, and postcards. Little souvenirs & mementos, like a pair of chopsticks he once used for walrus tusks much to everyone’s embarrassment at a Japanese restaurant. They surrounded me, literally box upon box of them, each one making me gladder still not to have yet found that one missing holiday greeting. Turns out getting lost down memory lane was just what I needed to do. It reminded me that there is so much of Roy still living in my own memory…
“I’m naked and it’s rather cold out here on the balcony.”
In answer to a call to the Highland Gardens hotel: “I’m naked and it’s rather cold out here on the balcony.” I still hardly knew this man, Roy Dotrice, and now he was talking about being naked? Outdoors!? Was he a nudist …or ssssomething worse(?!) I thought to myself with alarm. Then he mentioned dripping, and getting the phone wet. All was, ah, revealed. Turns out he’d been in the shower and had left the phone outside. Rather than put it down to let himself back in –and risk hanging up on me– he had stayed put! This, of course, reminded him of the time when out for a cold, mystically shrouded morning walk exploring Stonehenge (yes, THAT Stonehenge) he had encountered Charles Laughton (who was with the RSC at the time playing King Lear as well as umpping on Roy’s baseball team).
Laughton was raving his lines to the heavens stretched out stark naked on the altar stone! You don’t have to imagine what hearing that voice echoing sight yet unseen off those ancient pillars must of been like: https://youtu.be/T8ItZxzy9O4
…Roy did an excellent imitation. Being cold, wet, and naked himself on his courtyard balcony probably helped!
“Careful, darling!”
Roy was also a gifted photographer, although the day we traded cameras to take one another’s photos at Gladstone’s on Malibu Beach would never prove it.
It was my first time sticking a toe into the Pacific Ocean and this was to be my souvenir.
“Careful, Darling!” Kay was just glad when Roy had gotten down off the bench. The reason “Father” really needed a cane in “Beauty and the Beast’s” first season was because of falling backwards into an empty swimming pool trying to get everyone into a group shot. The first thing the EMT did when he got down in there with him was step on poor Roy’s hand!
I had kept them waiting for over an hour that day in California while I tried to comfort a friend on the phone who had just lost someone who had been like a mother to him. They were sweethearts about the delay and waited to take us to lunch without complaint. But that was no surprise, both Roy and Kay truly cared about people in general. Roy’s famous WWII story of the menacing camp guard who then made advances (Roy being in drag for the prisoners’ theater that evening) is not the whole story. He and Kay were relaxing by the pool at an Italian hotel years later when a man approached and introduced himself to them as THAT camp guard. Roy got up and took him aside and Kay watched them from a distance as they talked. The guard asked Roy’s forgiveness. He graciously gave it and then some. Watching the exchange turn friendly and even warm between the two men, Kay told me she had never been as proud of or more in love with her husband than at that moment.
Finding these photos from that day also reminded me of how much both Roy and Kay loved animals. Kay thought it an “almost spiritual experience” while out alone for a walk in the wilds of Australia one morning she had a close encounter with a mother koala and it’s child. Roy fed meat to the coyotes out Highland Gardens’ back door (to which everyone admonished him not to feed them his hand as well). When he noticed a flock of white ducks all crammed into a single crate on the sidewalk in Chinatown, he inquired about their welfare. The proprietor would only answer with a question, “how do you want them dressed?” “What?” Roy asked, then realized with a shock that the man was a butcher and the beautiful creatures were all destined for the dinner table. Appalled, he literally bought the whole lot out of bondage. They obliged by not making too much of a mess in the back of his Jeep Cherokee before he found a place to set them free. He finally loosed them on Hallenbeck Park, one of the few accessible public lakes in Los Angeles county. I would have written this exploit up in Pipeline at the time but I was afraid he’d get arrested by the park police! But as far as we could tell no environmental harm was done. The neighborhood took the flock to their hearts and they prospered. As it turns out the lake is such a congenial place it’s on a bird migration flyway. Generations of white ducks still live year round and mingle with the migrants there to this day.
“You take it!”
In Arlington after the first of a two-day Beauty and the Beast convention everyone was feeling particularly mellow. Roy ordered a warm cognac for a nightcap, but the hotel restaurant (that had just served up the best Chesapeake Bay crab cakes anyone could ask for) had never had such a request. He described what he wanted to the waiter who then returned with the flaming base to a fondue pot and a snifter the size of a goldfish bowl half full of brandy set atop it. Compliments of the staff, fans who had kept the place open long past closing time just so our little cadre could relax and enjoy their excellent view of the bay. Poor Roy nearly drowned trying to do their gift justice. The next day he also became the recipient of many flowers (mostly roses), 3 huge fruit baskets, and a bottle of Virginia wine. He couldn’t take them home on the plane with him but he didn’t want them left behind on the autograph table for those who had so lovingly given them to him to discover he’d left behind. We gathered them all up in one large bag and box, then stood there looking at it, perplexed. Suddenly he thrust the whole thing into my arms, “Here!” (After all, I was only taking a train home.) “No! Wait. I can’t.” “Well, we can’t just throw them away!” “But!” “Yes!” “But?” We’d hardly stopped laughing at this reverse tug-of-war when a friend insisted on a photo! Seven hours later (my train having had engine trouble) there I sat in an airless, sweltering train car, loath to take ownership of the package (but did anyway) because by the time my stop finally came everyone and everything around that bag fair reeked of dying roses and rotting fruit!
“He can put his shoes under my bed anytime!”
“He can put his shoes under my bed anytime!” Proclaimed author and friend Nan Dibble every time Roy came up in conversation. But only once did I ever truly entertain such a notion. I had just attended my one and only Broadway opening sitting behind the likes of caricaturist Al Hirchfeld and then theater critic Frank Rich ( http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/28/theater/review-theater-a-latter-day-look-at-pinter-s-homecoming.html ) During the intermission I even had a lovely conversation with their wives whilst in line for the ladies room. So that evening I had the privilege of watching them all watch Roy play the quintessentially worst, most licentious father ever, “Max” in Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” It was an evening to remember, also I was dressed to the nines (a rarity for me) and felt pretty darned spiffy and posh.
We stood outside the theater afterwards in Times Square in a crowd of new introductions and old friends about to go our separate ways. We were chatting with D.B. Sweeney about their upcoming movie “Cutting Edge” when out of the blue I suddenly realized where I was, near to the place where that famous photo was taken of the sailor kissing the woman celebrating the end of WWII. Strangely, it felt like the most romantic thought I’d ever had even though I never thought that way about the photo or this place before. At the same time it gave me the notion that it wasn’t really my thought at all, it was Roy‘s!
By this time we had both noticed that we tended to read each other’s minds rather often. Before he’d even uttered a word and long before ‘Caller ID,’ I knew and said so (much to his delight) when it was him on the phone. We even fantasized once that we might have known each other in past lives, having Marie Antionette in common in a funny kind of way. (Whole other story.)
I shifted slightly to take a quick glance back at Roy behind me and was met with my own expression smirking back. With that he gently but firmly gave my behind a squeeze and rested his hand there. To my credit I continued the conversation with D.B. without letting on. He and our other companions might have noticed however that I had leaned back, melted and flowed my approval lovingly up against Roy like the sauce on a hot fudge sundae. No comment where my hand automatically also came to rest. We just stood there hand on cheek in hand on cheek with one another in the middle of the crowded chaos of Times Square, grinning wickedly (and me trying not to blush) for no apparent reason at all.
“Guard this with your life!”
It was THE only recording of one of Roy’s greatest achievements, his one-man play “Brief Lives.” I’d just passed along a harrowing article about how old magnetic tape stock can deteriorate if not kept in ideal conditions. The 25 year old master copy of the play was on a huge 3/4 inch reel of the stuff probably rotting away in a basement in Lincolnshire. In horror, I put a bug in Roy’s ear. After conferring with the other rights owners, they decided to have it conserved. What no one told me was that it was determined I would be the one to do it! It was put in the mail without telling me or Roy …and it never arrived!!! It was weeks later before anyone realized it had gone missing. What a ghastly irony. What a good intention gone to hell. I was devastated, but Roy turned right round and stuck his own last VHS copy in the mail (this before I could suggest he at least have another copy made of that one first)! That tape I did receive. Thank you, God! But it was no where near broadcast quality, and the tape itself was not in the best shape either. But by God, I wasn’t going to let it out of my sight until I’d copied it and could return it safely back to him. It was a learn-as-you-go experience, took over a month to digitize and there were places I even had to go in and doctor the sound word by word, but it was good enough that Roy almost sold it ‘as is’ to a new cable channel in the US (which they mentioned could have him up for an Emmy!?) He didn’t like their terms and the channel itself folded before taking to the airwaves. A few years later however we did put “Brief Lives” up as a DVD for sale on Amazon, which finally fulfilled my dream of this wondrous performance being preserved for posterity.
“FriendofRoy”
As word spread that Roy had died, newspaper accounts quickly followed suit around the world. Some used video clips from “FriendofRoy” on YouTube as part of their obituaries online. It never occurred to me as I edited them nearly a decade ago that they would someday be used this way. I didn’t quite know how to feel about seeing them there. In my grief it just didn’t seem right somehow, as if this ‘fair use’ was unfair and should not have happened without his permission.
The very last thing I happened upon in my Christmas card search was a DVD of Roy’s last demo reel that he’d sent me 7 or so years ago. I’d never opened it as I had already put all the clips that were on it up online and a couple of them had almost got me kicked off YouTube for copyright infringement. On impulse, for no reason at all, I opened its case. To my surprise out fluttered this note I hadn’t known was there that he had tucked inside with the disk. In looking for one last ‘good-bye’ I had in the end found another, and read for the first time what I might never have otherwise seen:
Pipeline 