By Cynthia Citron
BEVERLY HILLS, California — In the hands of playwright Kathrine Bates, even history’s certified villains get a sympathetic hearing. Take, for example, Lucrezia Borgia. Bates penned (with Ted Lange) and starred in the one-woman Evil Legacy: The Story of Lucrezia Borgia, performing it first for a dozen friends in her own living room and in 1998 and 2009 at Theatre 40, her “artistic home” in Beverly Hills.
Now Bates is tackling the dramatic life story of yet another complex Catholic woman — Rose Kennedy. Bates’ new play The Color of Rose opens November 28 at Theatre 40, where the actress/playwright has been part of the company for several decades.
“I always do extensive research,” Bates says. “When I wrote about the Borgias I even made a trip to Italy…Lucrezia Borgia was said to have had incestuous relations with her father and brother, she poisoned people, she had many lovers, many children, and many miscarriages. She obtained a divorce from her first husband by claiming he was impotent and that she was a virgin, even though she was visibly pregnant at the time she denounced him. Her father, Pope Alexander VI, presided over a religion in which Eve, rather than Adam, was the original sinner. All the blame was set on the female, and this legacy of evil fell to Lucrezia.
“But in her later years, when she was the Duchess of Ferrara, she worked with the poor and they fell in love with her. And when she died, at 39, she was buried in a cloistered convent there.” After her research, Bates concluded “that she was not the evil one. It was her brother Cesare.”
“I have an affinity for history—and for scandals,” Bates says. And certainly Rose Kennedy’s family had its share of both, “which is why I have always been fascinated by her life story. She was a very resilient woman, and her foundation was in her faith and her family. She had nine children, was politically savvy, and maintained public and private personas. I believe she was admirable.”
Bates acknowledges that there are contradictory sources that make various claims, or refute them, about Rose Kennedy. “My conflict is between being a historian or a dramatist,” Bates says. “I want to be respectful, but after all, I’m not making a documentary, so I have to weigh everything in the balance and give precedence to the drama.”
This Kennedy project began with producer Chuck Fries some 30 years ago, when he developed a miniseries about Rose Kennedy for ABC-TV. ABC initially passed on the project but became interested in it again when Katharine Hepburn was tentatively scheduled to play Rose. Then Hepburn decided that she didn’t want to play the part while Rose Kennedy was still alive. But the Kennedy matriarch didn’t die until 1995, at the age of 104 — when Hepburn was 88, so the miniseries wasn’t made.
Fries had picked up the project again, intending to turn it into a one-woman play, when he met Bates, who had written and produced the popular The Manor for Theatre 40. Fries suggested that Bates write Rose’s play for three actresses — who would play a young, a middle-aged, and an older Rose, ruminating with one another about the events of her life
After several staged readings (including one at the Kirk Douglas Theatre) and a premiere earlier this year on Kennedy turf in Boston, the play’s West Coast debut opens tonight, with Fries producing and with Gloria Stroock playing the older Rose, Lia Sargent playing Rose in middle age, and Shelby Kocee as young Rose. Stroock also played Rose Kennedy in the TV movie Young Joe: The Forgotten Kennedy. But “no one has depicted Rose except in incidental spots in films about the other Kennedys,” says Fries (although she was the subject of a short documentary film that was nominated for an Oscar in 1991).
“Rose glossed over things in her autobiography,” Bates notes, “and the older Rose tries to do that in the play. But the other two Roses are there to contradict her. The middle-aged Rose is bitter about the way things have turned out, and the young Rose is wide-eyed and naïve.”
Throughout her life, Kennedy identified herself as “the mayor’s daughter” (Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald) and “the ambassador’s wife” (Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom), but apparently not as “the president’s mother.” In Chris Matthews’ new book about Jack Kennedy, he quotes Jackie Kennedy as claiming “his mother never loved him.” Says Bates, “How can I believe that? Rose had her tough side, but she was also full of complexities. We all change throughout our lives. In The Color of Rose we see her as strong, angry, bitter, harsh, vulnerable, and wise.”
Joe Sr., she adds, is portrayed “warts and all”: his appeasement sentiments before World War II, his many well-publicized affairs, his “tricks” with Jack’s political campaigns. Bates even brings up the issue of their daughter Rosemary’s disastrous lobotomy. “Did Joe even tell Rose he was going to authorize it? I think he did not,” she says.
“Rose dealt with all of that, but she set those things aside in favor of the more important memories,” Bates says, noting the pride with which Rose spoke of watching her husband, crippled by a stroke, struggle out of his wheelchair to “stand up for his president—his son Jack.”
In The Roar of the Crowd, produced by Theatre 40 in 2005, Bates dealt with the scandal that engulfed one of America’s most popular comedians and silent screen stars, Fatty Arbuckle, in 1921. At a party thrown by Arbuckle at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, a young bit player named Virginia Rappe became drunk and ill, suffered a ruptured bladder and died of peritonitis a few days later. Arbuckle was accused of raping and accidentally killing her, and he was tried for manslaughter. He underwent three trials before being acquitted, but he was ostracized and his films were banned.
Although he received a written apology from the third jury, he was never able to restore his destroyed reputation. “It’s a tragic story,” Bates says, “especially because everyone who knew him said he wouldn’t harm a flea. It’s a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.”
Bates hopes that her site-specific play The Manor, which is a fictionalized account of a grisly incident at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, will return to Greystone for its ninth year of performances in March. The mansion’s original owner Ned Doheny, the son of oil baron Edward Doheny, was found shot to death there in 1929, as was his friend and employee Hugh Plunkett. The names were changed in Bates’ play.
“Though the murderer is known, the motive isn’t,” Bates says. “Was it a homosexual relationship? Was Plunkett caught in an embezzlement scheme? Or—my guess—was Plunkett engaged in a love triangle with Ned’s young wife?”
Further, the play refers to the elder Doheny’s implication in the Teapot Dome scandal, in which he was accused of bribing the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, for the rights to drill on government-owned oil reserves. “While Doheny was acquitted of offering a bribe, Fall was found guilty of accepting it,” Bates says with a grin. “Doheny said they were friends and the money was a personal loan.”
In telling the story, the actors move from room to room in the mansion. The audience follows them, as Backstage West’s Dany Margolies noted in 2003, “to become eavesdroppers on the most secretive discussions” and “feel the chill hand of bygone days and bygone wealth.”
“I’m not interested in writing or doing a ‘normal’ play,” Bates says. “I envelop myself in these plays and I think I was born in the wrong century. I would much prefer to have been born during the Renaissance.”
As a Renaissance woman in the 21st century, Bates is also a classical pianist and the creator and conductor of the Choraliers, a Culver City-based choral group that has been giving Christmas holiday concerts since 1987. At the moment she is rehearsing this season’s performances while watching over the final rehearsals of The Color of Rose. Did Renaissance women multi-task?
The Color of Rose, produced by Theatre 40. Opens tonight. Plays Mon.-Wed., 8 pm (with one performance on Sun. 12/11 at 2 pm). Through Dec. 21. Tickets: $23-25. Reuben Cordova Theatre, 241 Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills (on the campus of Beverly Hills High School). 323-364-3606. www.theatre40.org.
*
Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com