Alec Guinness Takes Off His Masks

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"I'm a great gossip. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying." Alec Guinness, relaxing over lunch in Manhattan, is engaging in his favorite hobby: teasing. In fact, he is a great gossip, and it is impossible not to pay attention to what he says. During the past half-century or so, he has played dozens of memorable roles: a Prime Minister (Disraeli), a Pope (Innocent III), a King (Charles I), a prince (Arabia's Faisal), a fanatical colonel (Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai), a mad dictator (Hitler), a Jedi knight (Obi-wan Kenobi) and a spymaster (George Smiley in TV adaptations of John le Carre's espionage sagas). Now, at 71, he has added another role to that impressive list: author of one of the best show-business memoirs of recent years, a witty, wise and consistently entertaining account of life under the greasepaint.

Blessings in Disguise is Sir Alec's title, but the blessings in this all- too-short autobiography (Knopf; $17.95) wear no masks. Along with an engaging picture of Guinness himself, there are candid and almost always hilarious portraits of some of those he has met along the way to his threescore and eleven: George Bernard Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie, Edith Evans, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and even Ernie Kovacs, who, he says, was "just about the funniest man I have ever met."

One afternoon during the filming of Our Man in Havana, in which Kovacs played a corrupt police chief, Sir Alec passed the comedian's hotel room. The door was open, and Kovacs was sitting at a desk and typing furiously, surrounded by half a dozen naked girls reading magazines. "Shall I shut your door?" Guinness politely suggested. "No! For heaven's sakes!" replied Kovacs. "What would people say? They'd say Kovacs is in that room with a | bunch of naked broads. And they'd think the worst. With the door open they can see for themselves it's all perfectly innocent."

Although the knighthood was granted in 1959, Guinness does not consider himself on the same level as England's great aristocrats of the theater: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and the late Ralph Richardson. "I'm just not," he says. "It's as simple as that. It doesn't worry me. I never pretended to be." But he has known and, with characteristic detachment, admired all three.

Gielgud directed a Hamlet in which Guinness had a small part, and he can still hear that berating voice -- "like a silver trumpet muffled in silk." "Go away," he told Guinness crossly. "Come back in a week. Get someone to teach you how to act." Guinness did nothing except mope for seven days, but his absence was enough. Gielgud was now delighted with the young actor's new interpretation.

Perhaps the most endearing portrait is that of the eccentric Richardson. Directing Guinness in an Old Vic production of Richard II, Sir Ralph had only a few words of advice. Holding up a sharpened pencil, he said, "Play it like this pencil, old cock." Guinness admits that he was not greatly illuminated, and his Richard was a failure of which he is still ashamed.