The Enduring hal Holbroook

The Final Word, April 08
by Bruce Bellingham

Hal Holbrook has been haunting me these days. Yes, I know he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars for Sean Penn's Into the Wild, but it still startled me to see him on the broadcast. He's quite on in years. Still he's always been ubiquitous. He played the baddest and roguest of all rogue cops in Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movie in San Francisco way back when. Hal was so convincingly evil. Clint Eastwood can hire some terrific villains. The great part of that is that in person, Hal Holbrook seems like the nicest, most gracious guy in the world. He probably is. I met him once -- at an intimate party in his home in Hollywood that he shares with his wife, Dixie Carter. She embodies real Southern Charm. She takes your hand while she speaks to you, and gently strokes your fingers as she makes your acquaintance. Its a mixture of Apple Pan Dowdy and a Date Rape Drug. She does it with no effort nor pretense. She's just, well, charming. Hal's a bit like that but I don't recall him holding my hand. I wouldn't have minded. They are both lovely people.

Hal Holbroook has played Mark Twain on stage almost as long as Mark Twain played himself on terra firma. Hal Holbrook, for all practical reasons, IS Mark Twain. He got a big kick to learn that Mark Twain and I worked at the same paper, The San Francisco Examiner. Not at the same time, of course. Mr. Holbrook had a lot of questions, and Mr. Holbrook had all the answers about the era of Samuel Clemens and The Examiner. All I could could muster was a lame, "It hasn't been the same at the paper since Mark Twain left."

It's hard to imagine playing the same character on stage for over 50 years. Surely he picked up some of the mannerisms and quirks of the Twain character. The great character actor Raymond Massey played President Lincoln on Broadway for over 1,000 performances. He had adopted a few Lincolnesque twitches. This moved George S. Kaufman to snip when he saw Massey having lunch one day at Sardi's: "He won't be happy until he's assassinated."

Hal Holbrook was in San Francisco the other day, performing at the Jewish Community Center. I was told he had no time to accede to an interview with me. Perhaps he'd rather make one more clandestine run on a riverboat on the Sacramento Delta for old times' sake. I'm cool with that. Then I saw him on TV in the middle of the night, proffering some financial package in a tediously long infomercial. Then I realized: The real Mark Twain once went bankrupt and had a terror of losing his money again. So I can understand why Mr. Holbrook would channel this frame of mind. Most actors do. After all, Mark Twain observed, "The lack of money is the root of all evil."

Do you know what actors talk about at Hollywood parties? Where they can find they're next job. I hope Hal Holbrook never has to worry about things like that anymore. He's such a great artist, such a bedrock American figure. He's a indefatigable testament to both theater & history.

Perhaps he's haunting me these days because he represents such a solid fellow in these precarious, unreliable times -- and how susceptible I am to them.



Bruce Bellingham is the author of Bellingham by the Bay and writes for the Marina Times.