Anthony Quinn is in Germany wrapping The Seven Servants, his 300th
movie, maybe - he has lost count.
At 80, he is on screen everywhere in A Walk In The Clouds, and in
bookstores everywhere with a new autobiography called One Man Tango
(HarperCollins, $35). He says Orson Welles called him a one man tango for
surviving Rita Hayworth.
"I have lived a joyous life, but I am not a joyous man," he tells us. "I
believe a man writes the story of his life not in order to remember, but in
order to forget."
Quinn has a lot to forget. He was a child of the Mexican Revolution - "My
father saw romance in it. My mother saw food, and dying men, and my father."
Eventually the family escaped north by cattlecar.
"I told Steinbeck endless stories of my family's experiences in the migrant
fields of California, some of which he filtered through his own lens and
reimagined in his novels."
The new American drove a cab, warmed up racecars, unloaded trucks, shined
shoes, entered "dance contests I knew I could win" for trophies he knew he
could sell, had a short run as a pro boxer, preached and played saxophone for
Aimee Semple McPherson, won first prize in an architecture contest - all in
preparation for acting.
Acting made him a citizen of the world - he proved he could be anyone from
Attila the Hun through Zorba the Greek. And he admits: "Most of my pictures
were forgettable contrivances. Some, like the musical in which I played an
Indian chief who sold Manhattan Island to Fred MacMurray, probably did more
damage to my reputation than it could easily afford."
The melodrama of his social life began very young, when his chaste
engagement to a virgin was compromised by hot sex with her mother, who left
her husband to marry Quinn - who was too young to marry without parental
consent.
Quinn remained obsessed by virgins, and admits to slapping his first wife
(Cecil B. DeMille's daughter) viciously on their wedding night when he found
out she wasn't one.
But he felt quite free to have affairs with Hayworth, Carole Lombard, Linda
Darnell, Peggy Ryan (when she `belonged' to Howard Hughes), Maureen O'Hara,
Ingrid Bergman and her daughter Pia Lindstrom, and plenty of no-name
knock-outs.
Quinn claims 12 children.
"But I wonder if I have ever loved without provisions, if I have ever been
loved - truly loved! - in return."
He has less to say about men, except as mirrors for himself. For example he
describes Yul Brynner as "one of the most pretentious, temperamental people in
show business ... such a drearily insufferable man that I sometimes thought
they painted over his soul." Then he adds: "In some ways I was worse. I could
be a capricious bastard on a motion picture set. And why not? It was not in my
character to acquiesce to a producer, even in matters of little consequence.
Where was the sport in merely avoiding all friction? The true measure of an
actor's stature lay in his ability to make trouble."
Quinn does not avoid the mirror. "But each day I am someone else," he says,
"and I do not know that I will ever again make my full acquaintance."
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