This is the first in a series of posts and podcasts about the late Robert Cordier, a Belgium-American director, producer, poet, playwright and screenwriter who died on the Man Ray floor of the Alice Prin nursing home in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, of Covid-19, on April 7, 2020.
The series is occasioned by Ghost Artist, a feature-length documentary about Cordier that I had the good fortune to work on. It was directed by Steven Palmer and Edward Riche.
Ghost Artist will have its US premiere at the Anthology Film Archives in New York in September.
Note: To find out who the people are whose names are “dropped” in the following, please click on the links provided.
1.
Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means. ― Grace Kelly as Lisa Carol Fremont in Rear Window
Robert’s first New York romance was with Grace Kelly. “This was before High Noon. Before Mogambo. She was the most elegant woman I’d ever met, absolutely gorgeous. Even with a clothespin on her nose ― her teacher, Stella Adler, told her this would bring her voice down a register. She had a high-pitched squeak, a bit like Minnie Mouse, and it was keeping her from landing bigger parts.”
Robert had left Paris six months before, after being fired from Jean Vilar’s Festival d’Avignon production of Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio. “I was 19, still lost, and always on the make. All my New York friends were painters, musicians and poets, and they were all doing doing doing, and I was just sort of standing still. Most everyone I knew back then was queer or bi, in and out of one closet or another. And I didn’t know what the fuck I was. It was a different world. Everyone was into everything. And everybody. It was wide open. And then I met Grace, through Stella’s husband, Harold Clurman ― we were taking an acting class with him. Grace had just returned from a screen test, for Taxi, with Robert Alda, who I’d seen just the week before in Guys & Dolls. He was a better Sky Masterton than Marlon Brando was in the movie, and Marlon was probably the most amazing actor I’ve ever met.
Anyway, Bob Alda didn’t get the part, and Grace didn’t get the part. So she was back in New York doing bug spray commercials and cigarette ads, looking for her big break, and getting her kicks dancing topless for gentlemen callers like me, that she’d sneak into the Barbizon Hotel for Women on Lexington Avenue after curfew.
She was fun, super fun and super mignonne, and super sexy, but also a helluva good actor. I never understood why she gave it all up to marry that stiff old donkey from Monaco.”
2.
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter. ― Antonin Artaud
Jean Vilar met Robert through Marcel Marceau, who had urged the 17-year-old Belgian to come to Paris after seeing him in a walk-on part in Les Nuits de la Colère by Armand Salacrou at Le Rideau du Théâtre in Brussels in 1948.
Through Marceau, he met Jean Genet, who persuaded him to enter the Centre National du Spectacle, and take improv classes with Charles Dullin. Genet also introduced him to Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), and the writings of Antonin Artaud.
“This was the missing piece for me. Artaud, the last link. I had moved to Paris because I wanted to study under Jacques Copeau, the greatest of all the French directors. But he died right when I arrived. At the funeral, which I attended, Camus called him the greatest force in French theatre since Molière. He said there were only two periods in French theatre, pre-Copeau and post-Copeau. And I had missed my chance to work with him. It was like I was cursed or something.
But Dullin had studied under Copeau. And Vilar had studied under Dullin. And so had Artaud, at the same time as Vilar. And then Artaud broke with Dullin, and broke with the Surrealists, for reasons neither Dullin nor Vilar would ever tell me.
And then Artaud died, just a few months after Copeau.
I had only met him once, with Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet at Le Dôme. He was scribbling nonsense in his notebook, weird little sketches and stuff, never once looking up, not even registering that I was there.
I remember, some girl walked in naked, or jumped out of a cake for Kiki’s birthday party or something, and he still didn’t look up.
He was just this crazy-ass motherfucker, I thought. And Dullin and Vilar wouldn’t talk about him. But Genet said to me, “What, you never read Artaud? And you call yourself an actor?” And he gave me Artaud’s books, The Theatre and its Double and The Theatre of Cruelty, and they took the top of my head off.
They’re my bibles. Actors should burn at the stake, he said, and laugh at the flames. Theatre for him was like the plague, beneficial and necessary, an essential cleansing purgative that tears off the masks and pushes us to see ourselves as we are, with all our gutless lies and spinelessness, our baseness and smug bullshit.”
3.
TEBALDEO: I don't belong to anyone. For the mind to be free, the body must be too.
LORENZO: I feel like telling my valet to beat you with a stick.
― Lorenzaccio, Alfred de Musset
Cast in the Musset play by Jean Vilar as Tebaldeo, Robert ran into problems the first day of rehearsals with the star, Gérard Philipe.
“Vilar got sick and asked Gérard to direct the play. Gérard was already the lead, Lorenzo, but he had never directed before, and I think it went to his head a bit. The first thing he did was try to cut all my lines. Which is insane. Tebaldeo is key to the play, he jousts with Lorenzo about the meaning and nature of art, and social status, and manners. It’s not a big part, but it’s one of the juiciest in French theatre.
I guess Gérard just needed to assert himself. Or maybe he resented my relationship with Vilar, or that I got along better than he did with the other actors. Who knows? Jeanne Moreau was in the production, so was Charles Denner and Daniel Ivernel and Georges Wilson.
But Gérard was the biggest star of the day. He had just done La Beauté du diable for René Clair and La Ronde for Max Ophüls. Who was I? An 18-year-old smartass from Binche. Who dared question his direction.
He had me blackballed. No one would even give me an audition.”
Robert went back to Belgium, swearing to never set foot on a stage again. “Carnaval was on when I got to Binche, which is something the Binchois take very, very seriously. I hadn’t been in three years. So, like every other able-bodied man in town, I put on my Gilles mask, with the little green spectacles and the goatee, like a character out of a René Magritte painting – he was from the next town over – and an ostrich feather headdress a mile high.
My sisters stuffed straw into the back of my suit, to give me a hunchback, and strung bells around my waist, and off I went in wooden clogs to join the parade, covered in ribbons and tassels, yellow, black and red from tip to toe, dancing all day and night to the constant beat of the drums – thousands of drums, thousands of drummers – and me beating away evil spirits with my stick and throwing oranges at people’s heads in the crowd.
‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is home.’”
4.
“Mr. Cordier, who was born in Belgium, is a descendent on his maternal side of the de Medici family. ― New York Times, January 29, 1962, p. 16
Three weeks later, he borrowed money from his father and set sail for Philadelphia. A well-connected uncle there had got him a freshman slot at the Wharton School of Business.
“My old man was a cyclist, the Poulidor of Binche they called him. He was about to turn pro when the war hit, so he knew all about chasing dreams. And this was the American Dream, baby. This was it. I was going to be a businessman, a tycoon.”
He barely lasted a term.