A ROSE WITH THORNS
Ed Dixon recalls the legend who was his fatally flawed friend
HETHER stealing the show from under Richard Burton’s nose or entertaining at home with his pet mountain lion, legendary British character actor George Rose always seemed larger than life.
Perhaps the only thing more sensational than the “My Fair Lady” star’s life was his death: In 1988, near his vacation home in the Caribbean, he was mortally beaten by four men, one of them his teenage adoptive son and heir, with whom he probably had a sexual relationship. The killers went to prison, but Rose’s reputation was never the same.
Now, nearly 30 years later, fellow actor Ed Dixon is ready to talk about his eccentric mentor and idol.
“If you adore someone and you find out something about them you can’t bear, what happens to you — what happens to that love?” Dixon asks The Post. In his case, it became a one-man show, “Georgie: My Adventures With George Rose,” which opened Wednesday off-Broadway.
The adventures started in the early ’70s, when Dixon and the 28-years-older Rose toured in a production of “The Student Prince.”
“George had it in his contract that he could say anything he wanted, and you never knew what it would be,” Dixon says. But no matter what he ad-libbed, audiences loved him. As Burton put it after they did “Hamlet” together: “One should not have to share the stage with animals, children or George Rose.”
After the tour ended, Dixon says, he and Rose kept running into each other. One day, Rose invited him to tea and there, in his Greenwich Village apartment, was a mountain lion. “Of course it was illegal,” Dixon says, which is why Rose couldn’t walk it — or the lynx or other wild cats he kept as pets.
But in spite of the beasts he could smell from the hall, Dixon was thrilled that an actor of Rose’s magnitude would befriend him. It was Rose, the star of “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” who taught the Oklahoma-born Dixon how to act (“Look to the text — don’t bring your own psychological baggage!”) and how to live: openly and without pretense. “He was famous and gay, powerful and gay, rich and gay,” Dixon says. “People couldn’t say no to George. His personality was overwhelming.”
So was his secret. Invited to Rose’s home in the Dominican Republic, Dixon met the 18-year-old boy Rose had adopted six years before. Seeing them together and realizing their relationship was probably sexual made him uneasy.
“I said, ‘This is dangerous,’ [and Rose said] ‘Oh no, my dear boy, it’s the culture.’” Dixon says he fled back to New York. Days later, he got a phone call telling him Rose was dead, killed in a car accident. But there was no accident: His murderers later confessed they had only made it look that way.
Dixon’s own life spun out of control soon after, derailed by a drug addiction he says wasn’t precipitated by Rose’s death, although “that didn’t help.”
He sobered up in 1991. Now 68 — the age Rose was when he died — he’s written a memoir, several musicals and, now, this play.
“I idolized someone for 20 years and then found out he wasn’t exactly what I thought he was,” he says. “This is my journey, and the audience finds it out in the same way I did. It’s like a punch in the face.”