Alternate Gerrolds (5 page)

Ahhh, besides, Kennedy’s been done to death. Everybody does Kennedy. Because he’s easy to do. But lemme tell you something, sonny. Kennedy wasn’t really the sixties—uh uh. He’s just a convenient symbol. The sixties were a lot bigger than just another fading TV star.

Yeah, that’s right. His glory days were over. He was on his way out. You’re surprised to hear that, aren’t you?

Look. I’ll tell you something. Kennedy was not a good actor. In fact, he was goddamn lousy. He couldn’t act his way out of a pay toilet if he’d had Charlton Heston in there to help him.

But—it didn’t matter, did it? Hell, acting ability is the
last
thing in the
world a movie star needs. It never slowed down whatsisname, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan? Oh, you wouldn’t remember him. He was way before your time. He was sort of like a right-wing Henry Fonda, only he never got the kind of parts where he could inspire an audience. That’s what you need to make it—one good part where you make the audience squirm or cry or leap from their seats, shouting. Anything to make them remember you longer than the time it takes to get out to the parking lot. But Reagan never really got any of those. He was just another poor schmuck eaten up by the system. A very sad story, really.

Yeah, I know. You want to hear about Kennedy. Uh-uh. Lemme tell you about Reagan first. So you’ll see how easy it is to just disappear—and how much of a fluke it is to succeed.

See, Reagan wasn’t stupid. He was one of the few wartime actors who actually made a successful transition into television. He was smart enough to be a host instead of a star—that way he didn’t get himself typecast as a cowboy or a detective or a doctor. Reagan was a pretty good pitchman for General Electric on their Sunday night show and then—wait a minute, lemme see now, sometime in there he got himself elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, and that’s when all the trouble started—there was some uproar with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and the blacklist and the way he sold out his colleagues. I don’t really know the details, you can look it up. Anyway, tempers were hot, that’s all you need to know, and Reagan got himself impeached, almost thrown out of his own Guild as a result.

Well, nobody wanted to work with him after that. His name was mud. He couldn’t get arrested. And it was just tragic—’cause he was good, no question about it. Those pictures he did with the monkey were hysterical—oh, yeah, he did a whole series of movies at the end of the war.
Bonzo Goes To College, Bonzo Goes To Hollywood, Bonzo Goes To Washington.
Yeah, everybody remembers the chimpanzee, nobody remembers Reagan. Yeah, people in this town only have long memories when there’s a grudge attached.

So, Reagan couldn’t get work. I mean, not real work. He ended up making B-movies. A lot of crap. Stuff even Harry Cohn wouldn’t touch. He must have really needed the money. The fifties were all downhill for him.

I remember, he did—oh, what was it?—
Queen of Outer Space
with
that Hungarian broad. That was a real waste of film. Then he did some stuff with Ed Wood, remember him? Yeah, that’s the one. Anyway, Ronnie’s last picture was some piece of
dreck
called
Plan Nine From Outer Space.
Lugosi was supposed to do the part, but he died just before they started filming, so Reagan stepped in. I hear it’s real big on the college circuits now. What they call camp, where it’s so bad, it’s funny. Have you seen it? No, neither have I. Too bad, really. No telling what Reagan could have become if he’d just had the right breaks.

Oh, right—you want to talk about Kennedy. But you get my point, don’t you? This is a sorry excuse for an industry. There’s no
sympatico,
no consideration. Talent is considered a commodity. It gets wasted. People get chewed up just because they’re in someone else’s way. That’s the real story behind Kennedy—the people who got chewed up along the way.

Anyway, what was I saying about Kennedy before I got off the track? You wanna run that thing back? Oh, that’s right. Kennedy had no talent. Yeah, you can quote me—what difference does it make? Somebody going to sue me? What’re they going to get? My wheelchair? I’ll say it again. Kennedy had no talent for acting. Zero. Zilch.
Nada.
What he did have was a considerable talent for self-promotion. He was
great
at that.

And y’know what else? Y’know what else Kennedy had? He had
style.
You don’t need talent if you’ve got style. Mae West proved that. Gable proved that. Bette Davis.

Funny business, movies, television. Any other industry run the same way would go straight into the ground. A movie studio—you make one success, it pays for twenty flops. You have to be crazy to stay with it, y’know.

Okay, okay—back to Kennedy. Well, y’know, to really understand him, you gotta understand his dad. Joe Kennedy was one ambitious son of a bitch. He was smart enough to get his money out of the stock market before ’29. He put it into real estate. When everybody else was jumping out of windows, he was picking up pieces all over the place.

He got very active in politics for a while. FDR wanted to send him to England as an ambassador, but the deal fell through—nobody knows why. Maybe his divorce, who knows? Y’know, the Kennedys were Irish-Catholic. It would have been a big scandal. Especially then.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The story really starts when Joe Sr. brings his boys out to California. He marries Gloria Swanson and starts buying
up property and studios and contracts. Next thing you know, his boys are all over the place. They come popping out of USC, one after the other, like Ford Mustangs rolling off an assembly line.

In no time, Joe’s a director, Jack’s taken up acting and Bobby ends up running MGM. It’s Thalberg all over again. Lemme think. That had to be ’55 or ’56, somewhere in there. Actually, Teddy was the smart one. He stayed out of the business. He went East, stayed home with his mom and eventually went into politics where nobody ever heard of him again.

Anyway, you could see that Joe and Bobby were going to make out all right. They were all sonsabitches, but they were good sonsabitches. Joe did his homework, he brought in his pictures on time. Bobby was a ruthless S.O.B., but maybe that’s what you need to run a studio. He didn’t take any shit from anybody. Remember, he’s the guy who told Garland to get it together or get out. And she
did.

But Jack—Jack was always a problem. Two problems actually.

First of all, he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. Bobby had his hands full keeping the scandal-rags away from his brother. He had to buy off one columnist; he gave him the Rock Hudson story. The jackals had such a good time with that one they forgot all about Jack’s little peccadillos in Palm Springs. Sometimes I think Bobby would have killed to protect his brother. Y’know, Hudson lost the lead in
Giant
because of that
.
They’d already shot two or three weeks of good footage. They junked it all. Nearly shit-canned the whole picture, but Heston jumped in at the last moment and ended up beating out the Dean kid for the Oscar. Like I said, it’s a strange business.
Stupid
business.

Sometimes you end up hating the audience for just being the audience. It’s not fair, when you think about it. The public wants their heroes to look like they’re dashing and romantic and sexy—but they’re horrified if they actually behave that way. I mean, could
your
private life stand up to that kind of scrutiny? I’m not sure anybody’s could. Hell, the goddamn audience punishes the stars for doing the exact same things they’re doing—cheating on their wives, drinking too much, smoking a little weed. If they’re going to insist on morality tests for the actors, I think we should start insisting on morality tests for the audience before we let them in the theater. See how they’d like it for a change.

Oh well.

Anyway, the
other
problem was Jack’s accent—that goddamn Massachusetts accent. He’d have made a great cowboy. He had the look, he
had the build; but he couldn’t open his mouth without sounding like a New England lobsterman. I mean, can you imagine Jack Kennedy on a horse or behind a badge—with
that
accent? They brought in the best speech coaches in the world to work with him. A waste of goddamn money. He ended up sounding like Cary Grant with a sinus problem.

You can’t believe the parts he didn’t get because of his voice. Y’know, at one point Twentieth wanted him for
The Misfits
with Marilyn Monroe—now, that would have been a picture. Can you imagine Kennedy and Monroe? Pure screen magic. But it never happened. His voice again. No, as far as I know, they never even met.

But that was always the problem. Finding the right picture for Jack. George Pal, the Puppetoon guy, gave him his first big break with
War Of The Worlds
over at Paramount, but Jack always hated science fiction. Afraid he’d get typecast. He saw what happened to Karloff and Lugosi. He thought of science fiction as the same kind of stuff.

The funny thing was, the picture was a big hit, but that only made Jack unhappier. He knew the audience had come to see the Martians, not him. That’s when he swore, no more science fiction. And yeah, he really did say it, that famous quote: “Never play a scene with animals, children or Martians. They always use the Martian’s best take.”

Hitchcock had a good sense of how to use Kennedy, but he only worked with him once.
North By Northwest.
Another big hit. Kennedy loved the film—he loved all that spy stuff, he always wanted to play James Bond—but he didn’t like the way Hitchcock treated him. And he made the mistake of saying so to an interviewer. Remember? “Hitch doesn’t direct. He herds. He treats his actors like cattle.” That remark got back to Hitch, and the old man was terribly hurt by it. So, instead of casting Jack in his next film, he went to Jimmy Stewart. Who knows? Maybe that was best for everybody.

Jack spent nine months sitting on his ass, waiting for the right part. Nothing. Finally, he went to Bobby and said, “Help me get some of the good parts.” By now, Bobby was running MGM, and this gave him control over one studio and a lot of bargaining power with all the others—he was the biggest deal-maker in town, buying, selling, trading contracts right and left to put together the right package.

Even so, Bobby still had to twist a lot of arms to get Jack into
The Caine Mutiny.
Van Johnson had already been screen-tested. He’d been fitted for his costumes, everything—suddenly, he’s out on his ass and
here’s Jack Kennedy playing opposite Bogart. I can tell you, a lot of feathers were ruffled. Bogey knew how Jack got the part and he never forgave him for it. But, y’know—it helped the picture. Bogey’s resentment of Jack shows up on the screen in every scene. Bogey should have had the Oscar for that one, but Bobby bought it for Jack. There was so much studio pressure on the voting—well, never mind. That’s a body best left buried.

Anyway, in return, Bobby asked Jack to help him out with one or two of his problems. And Jack had no choice but to say yes. See, when Bobby took over MGM, one of the projects about to shoot was a thing called
Forbidden Planet.
Shakespeare in outer space. Dumb idea, right? That’s what everybody thought, at the time. They couldn’t cast it.

They were having real trouble finding a male lead, and they were about to go with ... oh, let me think. Oh, I don’t remember his name. He ended up doing a cop show on ABC. Oh, here’s a funny. At one point, they were even considering Ronald Reagan for the lead. Very strongly. But they finally passed on him—I guess Bobby remembered the McCarthy business. And that’s why Reagan went and did
Queen Of Outer Space.
Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Bobby finally asked Jack to play the captain of the spaceship.

And I gotta tell you. Jack didn’t want to do it—more of that science fiction crap, right?—but he couldn’t very well say no, could he? So he goes ahead and does it. Bobby retitles the picture
The New Frontier.
And guess what? It’s the studio’s biggest grossing picture for the year. Go figure. But everybody’s happy.

After that, Jack had a couple of rough years. One disaster after another. The biggest one was that goddamned musical. That was an embarrassment. The man should never have tried to sing. Even today, nobody can mention
Camelot
without thinking of Jack Kennedy, right? And those stupid tights.

You want my opinion, stay out of tights. Your career will never recover. It was all downhill for Errol Flynn after
Robin Hood,
and the goddamned tights killed poor George Reeves.
Superman
’s another one of those unproduceable properties. Nobody’s ever going to make that one work. Or
Batman.
Tights. That’s why.

Anyway, back to Kennedy—his career was in the dumper. So, when he was offered the chance to do a TV series, it didn’t look so bad any more. Most of the real action in town was moving to TV anyway. So Jack
went over to Desilu and played Eliot Ness in
The Untouchables.
Y’know, that was one of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite shows. Hoover even wrote to Kennedy and asked him for his autograph. He visited the set once just so he could get his picture taken with Jack. Hoover had to stand on a box. They shot him from the waist up, so’s you’d never know, but the photographer managed to get one good long shot.

Meanwhile, back over at MGM, Bobby’s looking at all the money that Warner Brothers and Desilu are making off TV and he’s thinking—there’s gotta be a way that he can cut himself a slice of that market, right? Right. So he starts looking around the lot to see what he’s got that can be exploited.

Well,
Father Knows Best
is a big hit, so Bobby thinks, “Let’s try turning
Andy Hardy
into a TV series. And how about
Dr. Kildare
too? The Hardy thing flopped. Bad casting. And it was opposite Disney on Sundays. It didn’t have a chance. But the Kildare property caught well enough to encourage him to try again.

So, Bobby Kennedy’s looking around, right? And here’s where all the pieces come together all at once. NBC says to him, “How about a science fiction series? You did that
New Frontier
thing. Why don’t you turn that into a TV series for us?”