Actors: The Boy Prince

The leading lady quit in a fury, and her complaint was her costar. “If I told you some of the things that son of a bitch has done to me,” said Elaine Stritch, “you wouldn’t believe it. This play has been the most horrible experience of my life.” The play was The Time of the Barracudas, which abruptly closed its pre-Broadway run in Los Angeles and was packed away in salt hay for extensive overhaul. The co-star was Laurence Harvey.

Fangy Screeches. Stritch’s feeling is not unique. “Harvey hasn’t a kind word to say for any woman he ever worked with,” says Elaine bitterly. In fact, a little cloud of H25O4 does seem to hover over Laurence Harvey’s head, sprinkling down on all around him, especially women. But he generally has the grace to pour a little milk after the acid. A Walk on the Wild Side he remembers as “a ghastly film, made more so by that ghastly woman Capucine,” but he adds: “I suppose it’s not her fault she can’t act.” And he thinks that Of Human Bondage—which opens in March, starring him with Kim Novak—should be released on Thanksgiving Day: “That’s when everybody has turkeys. Kim is a very attractive girl. But why does she try to act? I’m very fond of her.”

Harvey attracts much attention to himself with these fangy off-screen caterwauls, but he is not one of those stars who are all column-item and no credits. If considerably shy of being the best, he is at least the busiest actor in the business today. He is currently starring in the nabes as The Running Man; he has produced, directed and starred in a down-with-capital-punishment picture called The Ceremony. He will soon begin shooting Judgment in the Sun in Arizona, a story of rape among the oats.

Vodka Chaser. The film that made him famous was 1959’s Room at the Top, in which he affected a pudding-thick Yorkshire inflection. In Summer and Smoke he purred in decayed Southern tones, in Wild Side he was a drawl-in’ no-good Texas bum, and in Butterfield 8 he was a pale Yalie. This sort of variety is what he likes. “I refuse,” he says with a flip of the wrist, “to be myself in films. It’s been a long time since I’ve used my normal voice.”

This is just as well, for if he were to play his actual self, he would sever the very tendons of plausibility. He is a citizen of hotel rooms, and his “normal” accent is imitation Oxonian. He wears purple velvet slippers initialed in gold. He considers himself a connoisseur of fine wine, which he sometimes chases down with vodka.

He was born Larushka Skikne, in Lithuania, in 1928. His father was a Russian builder who moved to Johannesburg and raised him there from the age of six. He ran away from home and joined the South African Navy when he was 14. Later, he drifted into London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and one day, while passing under the sign attached to Harvey Nichols’ furnishings store, he thought the first of the two names looked just splendid in lights. So he changed his own name to Laurence Harvey.

Lavender Rolls. Today he is self-consciously flamboyant. At a Hollywood restaurant a few weeks ago, Governor Pat Brown came over to say hello. Harvey planted a warm buss on his cheek.

Afterward he spread-eagled his arms and gloated: “Now I can say I kissed the Governor of California.” He was once married to Margaret Leighton (they played opposite each other in As You Like It). Now Harvey lives in the $1,000,000 Beverly Hills hut of blonde and sumptuous Joan Cohn, 42-year-old widow of Harry Cohn, the onetime king of Columbia Pictures. Inside this off-white, Louis XV lair, Harvey whispers apologetically to visitors, “This isn’t really my taste. It isn’t really me.”

Joan Cohn calls him “the boy prince.” As a symbol of devotion, she once gave him a lavender Rolls-Royce with his initials on it. Harvey is among the financial backers of a small restaurant in Beverly Hills called The Bistro, and together they hold court there. Harvey likes to sit facing the walls—they are all made of mirrors. Thus his eyes, narrow as oriental slits, can see everybody who’s there, including himself, and he can smooth his light brown hair without going into Joan’s purse for a compact.

Blurred Nature. Gossipy as a hen, he makes cutting remarks about people who pass the table and then hails them aloud, saying, “You absolutely sweet and adorable man,” or “Hello, you sweet son of a bitch.” He mimics people with devastating and quite humorous precision. More often, however, he carps; and Harvey is really a phi beta carper.

“I’m not one of those people who’ve ever regretted what I’ve done,” he says, “but what others have done to me.” After making one typical film, he complains, “60% of my performance landed on the cutting-room floor. The producer must have worked for Adolf Eichmann. Studio people get hold of my pictures and with their dirty, grubby scissors they mutilate, rape and bastardize my work.”

Sometimes, speaking of himself in the third person, Harvey seems to sense and to compulsively reveal what’s eating him. “He was born under Russian-Lithuanian influences, and his parents’ speech was broken English,” he intones, “and he left his education far too early to pursue acting, which is so common and vulgar.”