Actors: The Bedroom Pirate

Charles Boyer is 65, having reached retirement age at the end of August, and he has accepted it in much the same way that Maurice Chevalier did eleven years ago, Albert Schweitzer 24 years ago, Jack Benny five years ago, and Bernard Baruch in 1935.

Next week he opens in a new weekly TV series called The Rogues. Meanwhile he is at work on a new movie called The Favor with Leslie Caron and Rock Hudson.

The TV series is being produced by Four Star Television. Boyer is a co-owner of Four Star, along with David Niven. They are both in the series, which NBC describes as “a comedy-melodrama about a family of jet-set jewel thieves and con men who are masters of separating the pompous rich from their ill-gotten gains . . . played against a backdrop of Riviera beaches, palatial villas, beautiful women and green felt gaming tables.”

All this has a familiar purr. The beautiful women now have names like BrookeHayward and Senta Berger, but the whole scene recallsthe young Boyer of Algiers, the fathomless possibilities of Hedy Lamarr, and the line he is legendary for whispering to her: “Come wiz me to zee casbah.” Actually, there was no such line in the movie, nor in any other movie Boyer ever made. It came from an old comedy-radio show. But Boyer wears it gracefully.

Salvaged Superiority. The casbah line and the other trademarks — the voice of a cello and the bedroom eyes — bore him, in fact. But he knows what he owes to them. Once, when he was urged to play a piratical swashbuckler in Frenchman’s Creek, he refused, saying: “I’m not a seagoing pirate. I’m a bedroom pirate.”

This was a frank and French appraisal of Hollywood practicalities, but it belies what he really thinks of himself as an actor. Trained at the Paris Conservatory, and an early success on the Parisian stage, he sees himself as an artist of stature and he has repeatedly proved it, most notably in the 1951 Broadway production of Don Juan in Hell, two years later in Kind Sir with Mary Martin, and in 1962 in Lord Pengo, a bad play from which he salvaged superior notices.

Too Busy to Listen. With such earned authority, Boyer has become a potent force on TV and film sets. He makes directors flinch. He watches rushes each day. If he does not like a scene, it is shot again. He gives stage directions, changes scripts, talks rapidly and is too busy to listen. When he happens to own the company that is doing the shooting, all this is his privilege; but he acts the same way when he is merely an employee. In Hold Back the Dawn, he played a European refugee trying to get into the U.S. from Mexico. The script called for him to address a passing cockroach bitterly, saying: “Where do you think you’re going? Have you a visa?”

“I don’t talk to cockroaches,” said Boyer with emphasis. Resisting every sort of pressure, he continued to ostracize the roach. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who wrote the film, got so mad at him that—at cutting time—they chopped every Boyer line that they could possibly get rid of. “So he won’t talk to cockroaches,” said Wilder. “O.K. Then he won’t talk to anybody.”

Half-bald since his 20s, Boyer never wears his toupee offscreen, and recently—as his parts have aged—he has been leaving it off while performing as well. He is a sleepless man—an hour of tossing for every five minutes of slumber. He has been married for 30 years, and has been an American citizen for 22. His wife was an English actress who gave up her career soon after their wedding. Because of his stability and longevity, Boyer is presumed rich, and he probably is by anyone’s standards but his own. “I’m not rich because in my most prosperous days salaries were not what they are now,” he says. Rich, in Beyer’s vocabulary must be a stupendous word indeed, since Boyer is reputedly worth $3,000,000 or $4,000,000. “Charles,” a friend says, “is a tightwad.”