AMAZING TRACE

Broadway

The brilliant Tracey Ullman stars in a one-woman show based on Errol Flynn's last fling

JAMES KAPLAN

There are persistent indications that America doesn't quite know what to make of Tracey Ullman. "This dreadful couple came backstage a few weeks ago," Ullman said. We were in Miami, where she was finishing a two-month tryout run playing Florence Aadland in the onewoman show The Big Love.

"They'd written me a letter—you know, nutty letter— just saying they wanted to meet me, and they'd watched me on TV. And he had on a white, horrible, zippered leisure suit and Elvis-type glasses, and a lot of jewelry on and a camera, and she was with a horrible blond perm, and dead person's shoes. And they just charged into the dressing room. She went [big fixed smile, helpful voice,

Florida accent], 'This is not your vehicle! You should be doing something like an Arsenio Hall show!' "

It might help us if Tracey Ullman were clearer about what to make of herself. Then again, is this a problem? Packaging is a peculiarly American obsession, and, as we know, most of it goes out with the trash. "I think people have difficulty promoting me," Ullman said. She was in one of her many civilian guises, Florida-fetching in jeans, bare midriff, and polka-dot blouse. For a change, she looked her astonishing age, which at that moment was still thirty. "They don't know how to pin it down—what am I?" Fill in the blank: the greatest talent to have hit television since Sid Caesar; a movie actor of barely tapped subtlety and power. (She also sings and dances.) If the eighties were about style over substance, Tracey Ullman is a star for the nineties. Why, then, has her star not burned even more brightly?

Maybe she goes in too deeply. In the work of Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, even Lily Tomlin, what you get, to a great degree, is Burnett as Burnett, Ball as Ball, Tomlin as Tomlin. Which, once you've bought into the initial concept, goes down quite easily. Ullman has an almost disquieting way of vanishing into the people she portrays. There was the time a middle-aged black woman came to the front door of The Tracey Ullman Show producer James Brooks's house and talked to him for a good long time before he realized he was speaking with his star, who was trying out a new role for the show.

"People have this misconception that Tracey Ullman is this comic character," says Lawrence Kasdan, who directed her in the 1990 movie / Love You to Death, in which her touching, unadorned performance as the betrayed wife of a philandering pizzamaker was an understated (and largely overlooked) gem. "She's in no way a comedian. She's a real, serious actor," Kasdan says.

Which is exactly what she has always insisted. At the same time, she detests the word. "In my, sort of, meaner moods, I just find it an embarrassing profession," Ullman says. "I find that only a teeny percent of people I really respect in this business are doing something I think genuinely creative and truthful, and there's a lot of periphery show business. That's what Florence is—periphery show business."

Florence Aadland's daughter, Beverly, some of you may remember, was Errol Flynn's final fling, a Hollywood Babylon footnote, the last in a skein of jailbait liaisons existing in rough parallel to his three marriages. The washed-up former swashbuckler was a bloated, alcoholic forty-eight, working hard on becoming destitute, when he took up with the lissome Beverly. Flynn had always liked young girls, but he seems to have had no idea at first quite how young this one was: barely fifteen on their first night of love, in 1957, a night that appears to have been desired less by Beverly (she hardly knew who Flynn was) than by her mother, a rather improbable former bar girl with an artificial foot, a taste for drink equal to Errol Flynn's, and a high flair for the dramatic.

Florence Aadland's 1961 as-told-to account of her daughter's two-year relationship with Flynn, The Big Love, became an overnight cult classic, elevated by William Styron's rave review in Esquire. Ullman's characterization of the nymphet's mother, part Charlotte Haze and part Lucille Ball, is a tour de force dissection of the infinite human capacity for self-deceit.

Tracey Ullman has been in the tour de force business for a long time, first in England, then here. Over four seasons on the Fox Network's The Tracey Ullman Show, week after week, she routinely accomplished the impossible, regularly becoming: fourteen-year-old Francesca, whose father happens to live with another man; Ginny Tillman, the fortyish divorced wife of a Beverly Hills proctologist; Carol, the black New York subway rider; Kay, an indefatigably middlebrow English secretary; Tina, a Queens postal worker; Summer Storm, a heavy-metal rocker; as well as any number of other people.

Ullman had a way of bringing the characters she played into the world fullblown, neuroses and all, so that even if you knew it was Tracey Ullman being someone else, all the overtly pleasing surfaces were gone and you weren't quite sure whether to laugh or cry. This could be difficult.

"Her show was really smart; a lot of people don't like that on TV,'' says Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons—which began as a series of brief cartoon interludes between the skits on The Tracey Ullman Show. "The Simpsons is smart, but it can be dumb too," Groening says. "Maybe that helps. But what they were doing every week was just phenomenal. And I think that in a strange way that may have worked against them. It was too good. People didn't believe she was actually doing this in front of a live audience."

"The truth of it is that it's an enormously demanding half-hour," says Fox Inc. chairman Barry Diller, conspicuously speaking in the present tense. "It completely goes against the normal rhythm of a comedy show. On a standard half-hour sitcom, you know all the characters, and it's two and a half acts. On Tracey's show, up comes a title, there's a sketch for four, five, seven minutes, and it's over. Then another sketch, and another. Each sketch has a beginning, middle, and an end.

"If you're of a relatively low wattage—and even smart people can be, sitting in front of TV at night—you say, 'Oh, God, just gimme a setup, setup, joke.' "

"Her talent is so compelling," James Brooks says. "It's like the French flag—you have to stop and salute."

It's true. This was unconventional TV with a vengeance. Sketches such as the one in which Ullman played Carol Anne—a prison inmate writhing with sex starvation while her visiting husband wants only hearts and flowers—may have been dazzling, but they were strong stuff for living-room America. Ullman's refusal to go for easy laughs (the show had no slapstick, and one of its mandates was that it include no TV or movie takeoffs) finally worked against her.

Her choice of movie roles has also been smart. She has done exactly three films to date: Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street in 1984, Fred Schepisi's version of David Hare's play Plenty in 1985 (she co-starred with Meryl Streep, Sting, and Sir John Gielgud), and Kasdan's I Love You to Death last year. While in McCartney's picture she mainly cried a lot, in Plenty Ullman was radiant as Alice, Streep's roundfaced bohemian pal: you couldn't take your eyes off her. "When Meryl Streep was doing Plenty," says television writer Marc Flanagan, "I asked her, 'So what's Sting like?' And she said, 'Forget Sting. This girl Tracey Ullman was amazing.' " "I was shocked that she was such a baby," Streep says. "I was eight years older than her! And she just strode on the set and did it."

"I've never met anyone who has less self-doubt than Tracey," says Jay Presson Allen, co-author, with her daughter, Brooke, of The Big Love, which opens in New York this month. "She'll try anything in the world. She'll do anything you'll ask her to do. Anything. Because she's not protecting anything— she's not self-conscious, because her confidence in her ability to perform is extraordinary. I think if she wishes to be, she can be a very great actress."

"She's a kind of kamikaze," agrees Isabella Rossellini, who asked to work on the TV show, guest-starred on several episodes, then became a friend. "She's very brave. When I worked with Baryshnikov, it was the same way."

"She's got very high and special standards," Lawrence Kasdan says. "She's an artist pursuing her own journey; she's not involved with other people's criteria. The fact that she's only done three pictures doesn't bother her. In her mind, the TV show was very satisfying, and she got to work with great people."

To a large extent, Tracey Ullman has had to play her life by ear: even if she's shown perfect pitch, that doesn't mean it's been easy. Improvising onstage is one thing; in life it's something else. "Her performance mode is completely different from her personal mode," says Brooke Allen. "When she's onstage, she's completely in command, but even during the curtain call, she's no longer Flo—she's very sort of self-deprecating and shy. She does not like to be the center of attention when she's offstage. Maybe that's one of the reasons she does character roles. She doesn't have to be herself."

The tension in The Big Love is between Florence Aadland's illusions about Hollywood myth and her (and our) sneaking suspicions of reality. Tracey Ullman harbors few illusions about anything, especially Hollywood.

"Errol Flynn isn't a myth to me," Ullman says. We're sitting in her kitchen in L.A. "I look at pictures of him, I see a big Aussie guy who liked to get drunk, with a capped tooth at the front. And he was a little boy! He liked little girls. That's what I see. I've never seen the glamour of Hollywood. It's like my Mabel—she watches The Wizard of Oz, and she has the same mentality as me. She says, 'Oh, look, Mummy, you can see where the studio wall starts.' "

This is a particularly cozy perch from which to be contemplating Babylon. There are Hollywood houses that feel tenanted, tended; a very few feel lived in. Tracey Ullman's—a big, renovated Spanish Mission-style house above West Sunset, all space and light and warmth, white stucco and wide windows and terra-cotta tile—is one of the latter. Mysterious lares and penates attend the place, where she lives with her husband, British sitcom producer Allan McKeown, and Mabel, their four-year-old daughter (another child is due in late summer). It's a couple of days after Christmas; the tree is still up in the foyer. There are leftover Fortnum & Mason mince pies in the Sub-Zero.

Tracey Ullman flickers: she is a presence both warm and removed, happy and deeply sad, antic and dead serious. She can look lovely and homely, old and young, in alternating split seconds. Her wide-boned face is endlessly interesting. "Would you like some tea?" she asks. She makes it herself, and serves it in a pot she stole from a hotel. She's wearing a pair of funky plaid culottes that Francesca, the fourteen-year-old with braces she used to play on her show, once wore. Her lank dark hair is pinned up carelessly. She seems to care as little about her own image as anyone else's. "The more information you get on a subject, the myth goes," she says. "I thought, Thank God Peter Sellers died. And my dad died—he was a bit of a hero. He was a wonderful guy—used to come home on Friday nights and take pound notes out of the lining of his coat. He died when I was six. He was only fifty. When I do that piece in the show every night about Errol Flynn dying at fifty—you can use things like that all your life." She becomes very quiet. " 'Cause I was in the room. And my dad said he felt sick. And he stopped breathing, and that was it."

Her father had been a Polish soldier evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940; her mother was a poor girl from South London. Antony Ullman worked every New World chance he could think of—selling furniture, booking travel, brokering marriages, and translating among the emigre Polish community—and built his family a plush life in the suburbs. Tracey and her older sister and their parents lived in a big Tudor house in Slough, with a pony in the garden. When her father died of a heart attack, it all went away.

"My father's business was all in secret books," Tracey says. "He had to collect all this money from the Polish people. And my mother, because she didn't speak Polish, they never really accepted her. I can remember those nights, that year after he died, freezing cold, sittin' in a car, with Mummy knocking on these doors, saying, 'Ah, Mrs. Winszczyk, I'm Dorin, Antony's widow. Now, remember you bought a sofa and a bed? And you still owe us'—and they'd just shut the door in her face.

"Sometimes they'd have us in, and they'd give us a glass of that hot tea. She'd bring the kids so they'd feel sorry.

"And so, having mixed fortunes like that, when you've lost it, the idea of getting it again, and having this"—she glances around the house—"I just treasure it, and appreciate it so much. And I'm so conscious of treating it glibly. I really appreciate it. So does Allan, 'cause he came from nothing."

Her impersonation of the nymphet's mother is a dissection of the infinite human capacity for self-deceit

At twelve, encouraged by her mother, Tracey tried out for a performing-arts school for children in London. ''I remember going up with my mother," she says, ''and I didn't have any training, I didn't have any costumes or anything. And there were all these girls in lilac tutus, and I was just in black. My mother'd bought me this nylon leotard and these black black shoes. Maybe I was doin' the real thing then, 'cause I got in. Instead of, like, twitting around to the Nutcracker, I'd do an improvised piece that I'd just figured out."

A persistent misfit, she quit school at sixteen and soon found herself dancing in Berlin, in a touring company of Gigi. She paid her dues in such venues as Glasgow and Liverpool, and worked her way up to featured roles in West End musicals. She played Kate Hardcastle in a Nigel Terry production of She Stoops to Conquer. Her creation of the born-again club singer Beverly in the improvisational comedy Four in a Million at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs won her the London Theatre Critics' Award as most promising new actress of 1981 and led her to star turns on such Britcoms as Three of a Kind, A Kick up the Eighties, and Girls on Top. (With some help from her TV fame, she also established a sideline as a minor pop star, with a gold album, a hit video, and four top-ten singles in the U.K.) By the time she was twenty, England had fallen in love with her. The tabloids tried to turn her into a perky version of her TV character: "Our Trace."

She wasn't having any. As her performances in McCartney's film and Plenty, along with her television and music-video work, generated critical mass, ICM came knocking. When agent Martha Luttrell sent a tape of Ullman's work to producerdirector James Brooks in 1986, he was so bowled over that (after CBS tried and failed to build a sitcom in which she would play a cute British nanny in New York) he created a TV series for her. ''Her talent is so compelling," Brooks says. ''It's like the French flag—you have to stop and salute." Brooks and his collaborators discussed all kinds of overarching concepts until they realized that any one would limit Ullman intolerably.

''We knew we had an impossible show to do," Brooks says. ''It was doing three little pilots, and trying to put song and dance on its feet, every week."

With its unconventional writing and its brilliant star, the show was worshiped for four seasons by a hard core of discerning fans, but ultimately, last spring, the core proved too small. "June was our date to decide, and she called in May," says Barry Diller. ''She said, 'I think we've done our best work, and it's time to stop.' She didn't call for a response; she wasn't asking for me to argue with her. She was very definitive.

''I think Tracey felt the show was becoming a drain on her. She'd done an awful lot of shows. I don't think she wanted to wait till she was rejected. She wanted to be in control, which we had great respect for."

Ullman says, "I rang Diller, and told him, and he said, 'Well, I respect your decision; we'll do anything you want.' And I knew I had to get off the phone, 'cause I was gonna cry. And I don't want to ever cry in front of Barry Diller."

In a strange way, the program fell victim to Fox's stunning success. Over the past two years, on the strength of such epater le mainstream shows as The Simpsons, Married.. .with Children, and In Living Color, the network turned a sea of red ink into a $35 million profit in fiscal 1989, and double that in fiscal '90, thereby nudging its way into the ABC-CBS-NBC troika (a triumph validated when, in a speech last year, NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff referred, matterof-factly but heart-stoppingly, to four networks).

"No, I don't think Fox did right by her," Jim Brooks says. "But in fairness to Barry Diller, he was building a network, and the stakes were very high." "The Tracey Ullman Show cost a fortune," Barry Diller says. "The production quality of this show had never been seen before—35-mm. film, perfect lighting, the sets, the band. We produced it ourselves—Fox invested far beyond the license fee for the show. Twentieth Television lost $25 million."

The wider public had no idea what to make of the show. Nor, apparently, did Fox. "They kept moving the show around," says Matt Groening. "And they didn't give it any promotion. And it should've been on Sunday night. I think a great lineup would've been The Simpsons followed by Tracey, on Sunday night."

"They never gave us a good time slot," says Ullman. ''They kept dickin' us around. We should've been on after Married. . .with Children. We were at first. And then they had this appalling program called Duet—and they decided to put me on after Duet. Well, I went completely crazy. I make no bones about saying I thought the show just stank. And I thought the follow-up, Open House, really stank.

"And Fox were claiming to be this innovative network. We were doing this, sometimes, just really wonderful, honest work, and they put me on after this fake sitcom shit like that—broke my heart. And I kept screaming at Diller and [Fox executive Peter] Chemin. I was embarrassed that they would not have enough faith in me—and put a piece of shit like Open House, that was fake and nasty, phony, forced.

"Fax never gave us a good time slot "says Ullman. "They kept dickin' us around."

"It seemed like, you know, we won an Emmy, and they just buried us, timeslot-wise. And that was very upsetting, 'cause it was a very big thing for Fox to win an Emmy."

"I think there was real anger about the shifting time slot, and that it was legitimate," Barry Diller says. "Networks do many things that are not necessarily in the interests of a particular show, and those things are not always smart. We had a very large audience for a very special show—but it wasn't large enough. Certain things take time. As the world speeds up, the rhythm of this show will become consistent with the rhythm of the audience. But it might take ten years. I think the eighty-something shows they did will be like The Honeymooners. I don't know when. But it's going to be pure, driven gold. We expect to get every nickel back. Plus, plus, plus."

After her TV show folded, Ullman made a typically Ullman move, taking last summer to play Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park for Joseph Papp. She had never tried Shakespeare before. "It was great to prove to Joe Papp—and prove to myself—that I could get away with it," Ullman says. She got away with it. The New York Times praised her "fierce presence and sardonic comic attack."

One day that summer, Ullman went to see a Wednesday matinee of Jay Presson Allen's Tru, starring Robert Morse as Truman Capote. "I just thought, Wow," Ullman says. "To be able to come to the theater every day and do something as good as this. 'Cause my dream, you know, is to be totally transported, just do another character."

She went backstage and told Morse, " 'I wish I could do something like that.' And he just said to me, 'You will.'

"I was in London in August, feeling rather 'What the hell do I do?' Just had turned down these middle-range movies that I just can't do—you know, these sort of two-people-posing-as-Russian-agents-running-aroundNew-York-hanging-off-buildings-type things I get offered. And then I got a call from my agent saying Jay Allen had a piece for a woman, and could she talk to me."

Tracey Ullman is sitting in her kitchen, watching a videotape of an unbelievably bad 1959 movie about the Cuban revolution called Cuban Rebel Girls. Yet Ullman is interested less in the film's true awfulness, and in the fact that it was Errol Flynn's last picture (he wrote and produced it himself, on a budget of what looks like about $39.95), than she is in the co-star, Beverly Aadland.

Now Beverly appears on the screen, in perfectly pressed rebel-girl garb. She is demonstrably not an actress, but she had something, and she was clearly a phenomenon: mile-long legs; slim figure; bleached-blond hair; sensual, slightly tough face. She was sixteen and a half when the film was made. She looks twenty-seven.

"There's my Bev," Ullman says— only it isn't the thirty-year-old Tracey Ullman talking, it's the fortysomething Flo Aadland, in the hard-r'd, lost-Okie accents of an alcoholic Angeleno stage mother, circa 1961.

"Look at her—isn't she amazing?" Ullman says, shifting instantly back to her own fluting Cockney tones. "You do see what poor old Errol saw in her, don't you?"

A little while later Tracey and Allan McKeown sit on the house's side porch, over tea and mince pies, talking about what they first saw in each other. TRACEY WEDS HER TV TYCOON, the London tabloids blared seven years ago. MYSTERY MAN WHO REALLY SUITS TRACEY. The only mysterious thing about Allan McKeown these days is how he fits in in Hollywood, a town where the unremitting entertainment-executive style seems to have passed smoothly through Rabe and Mamet parody back to reality. MeKeown, a deadpan, raffish-looking Cockney, likes to walk to his country club to play golf. It's not that he's ignorant of local customs—he's lived here on and off, largely on, for fifteen years—it's just that he prefers his own customs.

Bom in London's East End forty-four years ago, the son of a bricklayer, McKeown was bounced out of school at fourteen, and ended up forgoing his father's trade for hairdressing at Vidal Sassoon. This somehow led to producing television commercials, and this in turn led to producing sitcoms. This led to money, as a string of shows with such untransatlantic titles as Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, The Other 'Arf, and Shine On, Harvey Moon caught the peculiar risibilities of a large British viewing public. These days McKeown has six series in production in England, two of which he and CBS are attempting to translate into American.

His wife, with her matchless eye and ear, made the translation effortlessly, if not placidly ("When I first got here," she says, "I used to go around malls screaming at people—'You call this a culture?' "). McKeown is more steadfastly unregenerate. It suits him.

"I used to see Allan's name going up on the credits on TV," Tracey says as she pours the tea. "Then I did a pilot for him—I just wanted to get a bit of easy money. And I never ever can work that way. And he sensed that I was doing that. No one else did. He said, 'You don't want to do this, do you?' And I was like 'Hmm. He's found me out.' "

"She came up to my flat to see me about it," McKeown says. "And I thought, She's very attractive. She was going to do a pop record. I told her she should stick to comedy."

"Oh, he was so rude to me! He was 'orrible!"

The comer of McKeown's thin mouth rises slightly.

We're walking around Tracey Ullman's big house. Allan has gone off to play nine holes. Along a curving wall over the second-floor landing is a series of beautiful black-andwhite Hurrell portraits of Tracey. From downstairs, I mistook one of them—a profile, with chin raised—for a picture of Katharine Hepburn. Tracey as Hepbum. The Woman of One Thousand Faces. Sometimes her own faces, especially the lovely and the famous ones, seem to surprise even her. "I'm amazed how much I'm recognized for somebody who had a low-rated television show," Ullman says, laughing. "I don't get it. I'm friends with Meryl Streep, and I get recognized—she never gets recognized. I guess it's my voice.

"Just gettin' screamed at in shops— it's just so boring. [Valley Girl salesgirl voice] 'Oh my Gad! Oh my Gad! Look—Karen, come out! She's here! She's here!' You want to go, 'I just wanted to buy an ice cream—just leave me alone.' And if you do that, they go [hostile, injured Valley Girl], 'Hey, don't get shitty—I watch your show.'

"When I first got here I used to go around malls screaming at people'You call this a culture?'"

"It amazes me. They think you can cure cancer. It's like 'What do you want? A simple laying on of the hands?' Celebrity in America is extraordinary. It's like being in the royal family. But Chip Skipperson, the Channel 9 weatherman, gets the same response as I do. I don't kid myself it's 'cause it's me."

I ask how it's different in England.

"Our emotions are more established. Our whole culture, our whole sense of being, is more established, 'cause it's older. Some people here seem like children to me.

"And then you meet some extraordinary people—mostly, admittedly, from the East Coast—that are just as smart, just as established; they like quality and tradition as much as British people. They're just kinder. They're warmer. And that is something you have because you're a younger nation. And that is what I like. Because in Britain we can be so mean to each other. We're brought up with a self-depreciating streak. Everyone does it in England. We're more sarcastic; we're more cynical.

"We sneer when we turn on Richard Simmons. [Mincing self-improver voice] 'You're special and you should tell yourself you're special.' There's that quality of wanting to be loved and loving each other, and being more friendly. It's really tough in England. You don't go to anybody's house for years. And now I'm getting more social, and I'll say, 'Oh, just stop by my house.' I'd never say that in England.

"We're very funny, though. Our sense of humor is fabulous. But it's mean. But talking to media here is easier. When I look at things that have been written about me, about coming to America, it breaks my heart, actually. That I win an Emmy—I couldn't get an obituary written about me in The Times in England. It's very sad. Their attitude to success is very bad. [Plummy Times voice] 'An alternative comedian with a gift for mimicry won an award in America yesterday.' Stuff like that. And you read it, and you think, Oh, fuck you. Why can't you finally say I might've done it 'cause I can do something pretty well? I mean, it's the most we'll ever allow ourselves in England—that we do something pretty well. You know, here you'll say [fatuous analysand voice], 'I think I'm wonnerful.'

"I always like meeting up with Brits in L. A. I hate the ones that are there just for the money, and that are mocking the Americans. They just go [long-nosed voice], 'Oh, darling, it's all so bloody stupid—but you make $50,000 to mouth piffle.' And I say, 'Well, you needn't come here and do shit, you know?' Actors that you would see in the R.S.C. in England come here and do fuckin' soap operas and then bitch about it at a party in L.A. That type of thing I despise. I came here and I did something much better than I could ever have done in England at the time."

Back in the kitchen. Mabel, a remarkable four-year-old, with Allan McKeown's dead pan and Tracey Ullman's compulsion to perform (Mabel knows, for instance, entire blocks of The Big Love by heart, and tends to recite the more vehement scenes back to her mother when any sort of discipline is afoot), is dancing a pas de deux, to the Nutcracker, with the Dancing Ballerina she got for Christmas. She loops and swirls, staring at us all the while with her large, unsettlingly serious eyes. I think of Dorin Ullman encouraging her extravagantly gifted daughter to extend her talent into the world; I think of Florence Aadland, more perversely, thrusting her extravagantly sexual, modestly gifted daughter upon Errol Flynn. I think of need that creates and need that destroys, and of need that must never be completely satisfied if life is to have any meaning. Tracey Ullman, her small brown eyes glittering, is watching her daughter with a slight smile that knows everything and says nothing at all.