COLUMNS
Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain
When Mark Twain left this mortal coil in 1910, perched on the tail of Halley's Comet, he was 75.
When Holbrook brings the longest-running one-man show in U.S. theater history to town -- fast on the heels of his recent Oscar nomination -- he'll be a month into his 83rd year.
It's a safe bet the lead time to making himself up as the elderly Sam Clemens has receded, along with other physical matters -- correct?
Correct, says the star, who is nursing a cold in a Denver hotel room at the time of this interview.
But only in superficial, cosmetic ways, he says.
When he was a young man in his 20s and 30s, and even into middle age, he estimates it took him a solid four hours to transform himself into the 70-ish Twain.
"One night, I was looking into the mirror as I was putting the lines into my face, and said to myself, 'Holbrook! Are you out of your mind? What in the heck are making yourself up for when you don't have to put the lines in! They're already there. So I put the brush down fast."
Don't be fooled, though: He says it still takes him a solid 2½ hours before each Twain performance to get the wig and the mustache and, most importantly, the false nose in place.
"If you make a mistake and don't glue the nose on just right," he warns, "it can be a real mess."
And no one has ever accused one of America's literary giants and premier humorists of being a real mess.
As he has from the start more than half a century ago, Holbrook does it all himself: from makeup, to costume, right on through the script he continually edits and updates and keeps a work in progress.
Still, health issues can be a concern, such as the scare he had last fall that postponed his Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts performance, stalling it from November to March 14.
It was billed at the time as simple "exhaustion" incurred from yet another theater stint, playing the Stage Manager in a revival of "Our Town" at the Hartford Stage in Hartford, Conn.
"That actually was a tough disease that came out of nowhere and knocked out my immune system," he says. "I didn't know what I had, and I was lucky I went to a doctor after the performance. They had me on a plane to the Mayo Clinic the next morning. It was pretty chancy there for awhile, and it's taken me three months to recover."
But recover he has, that nagging cold notwithstanding.
"You've heard of Dr. Theater?" he continues. "Well, it's true: You get out on stage and this thing happens that energizes you and pulls you out of it."
Though it was filmed before his November medical crisis, his Oscar-nominated performance in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild," really was shot up in the mountain wild in the Salton Sea terrain of Southern California.
And that really was Holbrook, then 82, clambering up and over the rugged high-altitude terrain himself.
Never mind what our image may be of him.
Apart from Twain, he says he's probably best known to the masses for what he calls his "pinstripe suit" roles, playing (brilliantly) conspiratorial higher-ups in A-list hits like "Magnum Force," "All the President's Men" (as the shadow-bound Deep Throat), "The Star Chamber," "Wall Street," "The Firm" and his stints on TV's "West Wing" and "The Sopranos."
Don't be fooled, though: "I'm an outdoors person, and I'm outdoors every chance that I get: I swim outdoors each day, summer or winter. I work outdoors and am always out in the yard messing with the trees and things. And I'm also a sailor who's sailed through South Pacific."
Addendum: "So no, I'm not that pinstripe suit guy."
Certainly, Holbrook's age issues have been front and center lately, per his high-profile status as the oldest Best Supporting Actor nominee in Oscar history (he was even younger, 82, when the nominations were handed down in late January).
Yes, he lost to Javier Bardem's showier turn in the Coen Bros.' much-lauded "No Country for Old Men."
But it's Holbrook's "Into the Wild" performance as the old man who befriends Emile Hirsch's mountain-wandering character that may wind up being remembered longer, courtesy that record he now holds.
Even though he owns five Emmys and a Tony, he was still impressed by Oscar's courtship.
"I'm very grateful," he says. "And Sean Penn was wonderful. I don't know who gave him my name for that role, but it was the first chance I've had in a long time to do something different in a big film instead of one of these little offbeat independent things."
And the character he plays in "Into the Wild" is closer to the real-life Holbrook than the pin-stripe guys or even Mark Twain.
Even so, it's the latter portrayal that has been his bread-and-butter and passion over a lifetime of acting. And he says he has no plans to abandon it at this late stage of the game.
For more than 90 minutes, Holbrook holds the stage solo -- all the time while standing, sitting, roving, chewing a cigar and generally riveting the audience to its seats through the sheer magnum force of his personality (to evoke the title of the 1973 Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" sequel film sporting one of Holbrook's juiciest screen performances).
Has Holbrook grown into the role or has the role grown into Holbrook?
Like Twain, he admits to being a man who doesn't suffer fools or injustices lightly.
"I get angry easily, and that makes me want to do something about it," he says. "To just stand there and let it run over you without objecting -- that's pretty disgraceful.
"And that's where Mark Twain comes in. I don't know how to tell you how lucky I am to have him as my mouthpiece, to express the feelings I have about what's happening to society and humanity."
That stroke of good luck began its life as a college honors project about Twain, which inspired young Holbrook to take the evolutionary leap of assuming the persona of Twain himself, all while still a lanky young man in his 20s.
He went national with the portrayal on a segment of TVs' "The Ed Sullivan Show" 52 years ago this winter. He had a very good year with Twain, especially, in 1966, taking the performance to Broadway, where he won a Best Actor Tony Award, and to a prime-time CBS showing in 1967, for which he was nominated for his first Best Actor Emmy Award.
There's been no turning back from the wit and wisdom of Hannibal, Mo.'s, favorite son ever since.
He's clocked well over 2,000 performances over the decades, with no end in sight.
His third wife, actress Dixie ("Designing Women") Carter, whom he wed in 1984, is no slouch, either, winning renewed fame, along with her own Emmy nomination, via "Desperate Housewives," where she's the very scary Gloria Hodge, scheming mother of Kyle MacLachlan's Orson Hodge.
"The reason the show does not get tired is because the material is so wonderful to begin with, in any form -- whether as a movie, a TV show or a stage performance. Twain is so topical that he still speaks to things going on in the world today.
Through the years, Holbrook has handled all the research and editorial work himself. He claims not to know what will emerge from his mouth when he steps on stage.
"I go out and don't know what the first word will be. The programming of the material is all very ad-libbed, and I can switch directions and go anywhere I want," he says.
"The whole essence of playing Twain is improvisation. It has to look like an old man's mind thinking up the next thought. And you never know whether you're going to laugh or be shocked. That's where the suspense comes. And every play has to have suspense."
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© Copyright 2008, The Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, Japan
