Grab Your Smelling Salts; Elizabeth Ashley Tells It Like It Is By David Richards Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 31, 1998; Page G01

Elizabeth Ashley as the Princess Kosmonopolis and Michael Hayden as Chance Wayne in "Sweet Bird of Youth." (By Carol Rosegg/Shakespeare Theatre)

Outrageous ideas, singular opinions, Southern-fried anecdotes, mea culpas and ringing accusations – it's all in a morning's conversation for the 58-year-old veteran actress, or, as she puts it, "senior warriorette in this most peculiar of trades."

If Ashley, who opens tonight in "Sweet Bird of Youth" at the Shakespeare Theatre, stops talking for more than a nanosecond, it is only to take a drag on the Carlton cigarette that dangles from her lips. Carltons are not much better than "lettuce leaves" in her view, but they give her "something to chew on" between thoughts indignant and sublime.

At this particular moment, for example, she is going on about the courage of actors, as opposed to what she deems the general cowardice of the white male power-brokers in America. Her hands are waving and her green eyes are flashing, and her voice has taken on the hypnotic sound of a rockslide when it's gaining on you.

"What we do is so brave," she explains, "because every time the live performer goes to work, we risk. We risk planetary, international public humiliation and ridicule, every time we stand up in front of people and say, 'I'm going to take you someplace. I'm going to get you to feel and see things you would never see and feel, if you hadn't stumbled in and paid the price to sit in that chair tonight.'

"That humiliation is what white, male, North American Anglo-Saxons, the biggest power cabal on the planet, are most deeply terrified of in life. Really, if you said to them, 'You've got two choices. Make one quick. A bullet to the brain right now and you get to meet your maker, whoever that might be. Or else you live with international, planetary humiliation for the rest of your life, which will be long.' They would pray for the bullet. They'd beg for the bullet. That is why anybody who says live performers aren't as brave as the dirtiest Special Forces Marines doesn't know what he's talking about. And that is the bottom line."

Ashley has reason to be wired, beyond what seems to be a genetic predisposition toward flamboyant behavior; "Sweet Bird of Youth" reunites her with playwright Tennessee Williams and director Michael Kahn. More than 20 years ago, she scored one of the biggest triumphs of her career as Maggie the Cat in a smoldering revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," also directed by Kahn. So expectations are running high and nerves are on edge. Hers, as much as anybody's. (The production runs through July 19, and there is already, as the expression has it, "New York interest.")

This time, Ashley is playing Alexandra del Lago, a onetime movie legend whose comeback film has failed miserably, and who has fled Hollywood in her winged Cadillac with a two-bit gigolo, Chance Wayne (Michael Hayden), at her side. The pair wash up in a small Southern town, where zealotry burns bright and hope, like the sweet bird of youth, has flown the coop. While the play tells Chance's story (a young Paul Newman created the role on Broadway in 1959), Ashley's is the dazzling role – monstrous in its dimensions, voracious in its demands.

"This is a woman who has no illusions or delusions," the actress says. "She knows who, what and where she is, although she may be so hung over much of the time that she can't geographically locate herself. Spiritually, she knows. She sees. And true vision is a terrible thing, when you can no longer pretend that the things that have happened to you haven't happened. Her drinking, the pills, the rearranging of the brain cells – all those things that people do – is self-medication, an attempt to blind the heart, the eye of the soul."

Ashley has laid claim to an overstuffed couch in what the Shakespeare Theatre calls its greenroom, although nothing in the disheveled area is green, save a few stains on the carpet. Upon entering, she kicks off her red mules and folds her legs under her, yoga-style. Rather like a child determined to stay up past her bedtime, however, she cannot keep to a fixed position. She flops over backward, kicks up a leg, pitches her head forward, splays her fingers and flaps her arms.

Talking volubly all the while.

"Cat" spawned an enduring friendship between Ashley and Williams, and she has since appeared in such Williams plays as "Suddenly Last Summer," "Red Devil Battery Sign" and "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore." "Sweet Bird of Youth" was all but preordained.

"I guess I tend to get offered a lot of Williams," she acknowledges. "I have an affinity for him. 'Cat' was such a watershed event in my life. Tennessee is so layered, so dense. It's like mining. You have to go down so many levels. But under the song, there's grit, outrageous humor and such irony. Never underestimate a playwright's imagination and stream of consciousness. Like all great poets and writers, the man has a secret inner language."

She pauses to reignite her Carlton, which has burned out in a wisp of nasty-smelling smoke. A two-inch flame shoots out of the end of her gold cigarette case with built-in lighter. James Bond would approve.

"People think I have a certain feeling for Tennessee because I am Southern. No, no, no," she says. "That's the set dressing. It's because I come from a long line of Southern psychotics and an environment where madness is currency and conversation is blood sport."

Kahn, whom Ashley refers to invariably as "The Mighty Kahn," believes the casting was all but inevitable. "Elizabeth's personality, her career and her own life come together to make this the perfect part for her. It's larger than life. She's larger than life. This is a character who wakes up in the morning and, for the first 30 minutes of the play, doesn't know who she's slept with the night before. That's a challenge right there! She's got amnesia and can't remember her past. She's on drugs or drunk much of the time. These are acting problems that require an awful lot of skill. But Elizabeth, calling on herself and her imagination, is able to justify Tennessee's wildest flights of fantasy."

While Ashley's life is not quite that of Alexandra del Lago, it has had a similar roller-coaster quality. In the '60s, fan magazines salivated over her rocky marriages to actors James Farentino and George Peppard, and then later, over her high-flying affair with novelist Thomas McGuane. She did time as a starlet in L.A. – which she refers to as "Lah" – and has a fair number of vapid movie credits to show for it ("The Carpetbaggers," "The Third Day," "Ship of Fools"). Regularly, she has announced her retirement from the business, which meant usually that she had taken up with a new companion and was spending time on a sailboat in the Caribbean.

In the mid-1970s she appeared on Broadway in an ill-fated comic western called "Legend," the poster for which showed her in form-hugging jeans, packing a pair of pistols at the hips. Ashley has nurtured the desperado image ever since. Her 1978 autobiography, "Actress: Postcards From the Road," was of the let-it-all-hang out variety, and she jokes now that she won't write the sequel "until the statute of limitations runs out."

"There's one great way to change your life, get out of a crisis, solve problems," she says. "Leave town! That's probably how I have dealt with every major crisis and quagmire of my life. It's what I do best. There was a time when I was married to everybody in the world. I would get married, retire, then, to get out of the marriage, I would leave the country. People for years have said this is no way to run a career. They were absolutely right. But it was not the worst way in the world to run a life."

Under it all, though, behind the madness and the flash, there is a daredevil actress who prizes artistic truth. If Ashley is crazy, it is a shrewd kind of crazy. And if she is a rebel, she is a rebel with a cause: her craft. She erupts spectacularly – onstage and off. But rarely does she ever lose control.

"I'd heard that Elizabeth was difficult," says her "Sweet Bird" co-star Hayden, the young actor who first gained notice in the 1994 Broadway revival of "Carousel." "But there are two kinds of difficult. One is the person who is self-centered and thinks only of himself. And the other kind of difficult is the person who cares so much for the work they won't settle for less. That's Elizabeth. That kind I don't mind. She goes the full distance."

And it may be, too, that at 58 Ashley has . . . no, not mellowed . . . no, not softened . . . but, well, become more user-friendly than she was in her headstrong days. Her sense of irony seems keener, the wit slyer, the indignation tempered with generosity. She's always been commanding. She's becoming oddly engaging as well.

"At my advanced age, kids approach me as if I were Hunter Thompson or somebody," she says. "I guess their mothers have told them about me. I've had some good, adventurous, dangerous times in my life. But if I had, in fact, done everything it's been said I've done, took everything I'm reported to have taken and slept with everybody they say I slept with, I would now be on my back in a jar in a laboratory at Harvard. Okay?

"I always thought the fact that I showed up with great consistency for eight shows a week, year in year out, meant something. But that was never factored in. My mother, Miss Lucille, a great woman, used to say, 'Let us discuss labor, before we discuss art.' It's true. If you don't have a job, you don't have a life. You commit yourself to what it is that is going to let you earn your keep on this Earth."

Young and Restless

Ashley was born in Florida, but she is quick to point out that hers was not a genteel Southern upbringing, even though the family tree boasts a Confederate general or two and the odd aristocrat. When she was 5, her mother and her father, a jazz musician, got divorced. Her mother, benefiting from one of Roosevelt's self-help programs during the Depression, learned to type and got herself a job as a secretary in Baton Rouge, La., where Elizabeth, a k a Bessie, grew up. She was rebellious from the start.

"Gulf Coast Louisiana ain't hardly America," Ashley observes. "Down there you're relieved of a lot of the burden of being a warrior for the Lord. They don't call it the Big Easy for nothing. I spent my youth working Baton Rouge to Biloxi in a '52 Dodge with a can of Dixie beer in one hand and a Picayune cigarette in the other. I learned early how to load the shotgun and hand the guy the number 5 wrench, which is what you had to do if you wanted to hang out with the bad guys with the good pickup trucks, who drove fast and drank beer."

Her high school, which is as far as her formal education went, was located on the LSU campus – "right opposite fraternity row and directly behind where they practiced football," she says. "Fats Domino played at my high school prom. The three local bands were Fats Domino, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. For an extra hundred dollars over the two hundred you had to pay them to play, you could get Ray Charles to come over from Jackson, Mississippi. It was not the worst way to go to high school, but it was not what my mother had in mind."

By the time she was 18, Ashley was out of Baton Rouge and pursuing glamour and a career in New York City. The career came quickly. Too quickly, she has often said. Her Broadway debut, a fluffy 1961 comedy called "Take Her, She's Mine," won her a Tony. She was off to Hollywood to make "The Carpetbaggers." In 1963, she was back on Broadway in "Barefoot in the Park," opposite Robert Redford.

Of that period, she says, "I had a smart mouth and a bad attitude and was on the cover of a lot of magazines."

Over the years, the movie roles haven't been all that good and the TV movie roles have been worse. But whenever the chips are down, Ashley usually manages to come up with a stunning stage performance to remind people that she is more than a sassy mouth with a mop of unruly hair. For the bicentennial, she was a divinely seductive Sabina in "The Skin of Our Teeth" at the Kennedy Center. In 1982, with only 10 days' notice, she stepped into "Agnes of God" and her portrayal of a chain-smoking psychiatrist, trying to unravel the mystery of a nun who may have given birth to a baby, helped make the strange play a Broadway hit. Earlier this year, she toured as outspoken fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland in the one-woman show "Full Gallop."

Given her devotion to live theater, it may be ironic that America, circa 1998, seems to know her best from her four-year stint on "Evening Shade," Burt Reynolds's CBS sitcom. Ashley looks back upon it now with a shrug, and claims it wasn't all that bad, because:

1) She likes Burt a lot and thinks of him as "the last of the great innocents."

2) As Frieda Evans and Herman Stiles, she and Michael Jeter got to play the two "edge-of-the-envelope characters" and "in network land, it was dodgy, edgy stuff, even if it was like Sunday afternoon Popsicle time for us."

3) It paid the bills. Ashley puts great store by paying the bills. No freeloading for her. No alimony, although she claims she's had to shell it out. You pay your own way or you don't go on the ride.

"Actresses," she muses, "should learn to have rendezvous relationships. It should be written in stone, 'You are not going to pick men very well for the long haul.' Life partners, you're not going to find. Romance? Never let them move in to where you live. Don't even let them sit on the couch too long. Their butt will grow to it and you will wind up having to pay their lawyers."

'Old Soldier'

In the course of conversation, Ashley's loose black blouse has drifted off her shoulder – a nod to 1950s calendar art that is surely unintentional, if no less effective for that. She remains a smashing-looking woman, although she tends to pooh-pooh any compliments in that regard.

"People like me are old soldiers. That's what we are," she snorts. "We've done it for so long. We're laborers, blue-collar workers. Professional stage actors and guys in professional sports are the last Americans who physically sweat to earn their living."

She has uncurled her legs by now and is now spread out on the couch in the style of Cleopatra, a character she once played in Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra." Since she has had the first word and the middle word, too, it is only appropriate that she should have the last word as well.

How would she summarize herself?

She thinks for another nanosecond, then replies, "As an actress, I'm an adventurer. At my very best – when I have a support team, like Michael Kahn and this theater, these actors – I can be very brave. I can do things, take actions, be ways I could never be or do in my actual life. I know this, having tried and failed.

"As a human being, I am eccentric, but average. I'm an average eccentric. I'm a hermit, a loner, sort of a recluse. I talk to myself a lot. Happiness for me is cable TV, people who deliver pizza, air-conditioning, remote control and a foot locker of paperback books that I can reach without getting out of bed."

Ashley flings back a lustrous mane of hair. "Oh, yes, and preferably a window that looks out on the sea."