My Life as a Mankiewicz (42 page)

7

The 1970s Gallery

Paddy Chayefsky

Whiplash smart, wonderfully talented, actively plain looking, simultaneously cynical and sentimental. Among other things, Paddy was famous for going everywhere without his wife, who apparently had no interest in show business whatsoever. I once explained to him what a great advantage that was—he could go to almost any restaurant or party with whatever woman he chose and introduce her as his wife, no one being the wiser.

Paddy was the only screenwriter I've ever heard of who had the contractual power to approve or even replace a director on an original screenplay of his. He'd cut his teeth in the theater, where these powers belonged to the author of the play, and insisted on carrying them over to film as a condition of purchasing his original work. At the start of
The Hospital
(a frightening indictment of the health care system, absolutely relevant today), starring George C. Scott, he had chosen a young director, Michael Ritchie, who had made
Downhill Racer
with Robert Redford. But Paddy grew increasingly disenchanted with him. He told United Artists he wanted to replace Ritchie with Arthur Hiller. UA executives balked, explaining to Paddy that with Hiller, “All you're going to get is the script.”

“Aha!” Paddy shouted. He got Arthur Hiller.

I used to play poker with Paddy in New York in the seventies. One night, the game broke up late, about 2:00
A.M.
Paddy, an actor named Larry Blyden, who was on Broadway at the time, and I got into the apartment house elevator on the twentieth floor and pressed the button for the lobby. After a couple of floors, the elevator suddenly shook—then stopped dead. We were stuck, suspended some seventeen stories high. Silence. We tried the little phone on the wall—it didn't work. We pressed the red emergency button—nothing. I was stunned. Larry suddenly fell apart. He turned to me, panicked: “You write James Bond,” he said in all seriousness. “How the hell would James Bond get out of here?”

“Larry, he'd take the sliding panel off the roof and climb up the cables to the next landing, except this roof's rock solid and I can't climb cables.” I looked over and down. Paddy was slumped in the corner. “Paddy, are you all right?”

He looked up. “Oh, sure…except for the fact that I told my wife I'd be home by midnight, I lost over a thousand dollars in the game, and now I'm stuck in the middle of a goddamn Neil Simon play.” Eventually, we heard someone moving in the hall above, banged on the walls, and yelled. He called the apartment house manager, and we were finally cranked up.

His brilliant screenplay for
Network
was described by critics at the time as a scathing satire of the future of television news. Paddy always insisted that actually it would become “a fucking documentary.” In it, Peter Finch's newsman, Howard Beale, rants and raves as a perfect precursor of today's Glenn Beck on Fox News. Part of Beale's bizarre broadcast was a feature called Vox Populi. When Katie Couric took over the
CBS Evening News
, one of the added features (eventually dropped) was—you guessed it—Vox Populi.

Paddy and Bob Fosse

The brilliantly talented choreographer-director Bob Fosse told me this wonderfully revealing story about Paddy: Bob (the only choreographer I ever saw who always worked with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth) was in a Chicago hospital, in immediate need of a dangerous heart operation. He asked his two best friends, Paddy and playwright Herb Gardner
(A Thousand Clowns)
, to fly out on the day of the procedure. In the hospital room, Bob handed them copies of his will in which he had named them coexecutors. He explained there was a real chance he wouldn't survive the operation and asked them to sign the document before he went into surgery. Herb, in tears, did so immediately. Bob then looked over at Paddy, who sat in the corner, reading. “Is something wrong, Paddy?”

“No, but I never signed anything in my life I didn't read first.”

The hospital orderlies were prepping Bob to leave. Paddy finally looked up: “I'm not in your will.”

“No, you're not, Paddy. You're fabulously successful. I'm leaving everything to Gwen (Verdon) and the kids.”

Paddy rose and crossed to him. “I can't believe I'm not in your will.” He tossed the document onto the bed. “Fuck you, then. Live.”

Bob said those were the last words he heard before he was wheeled out. As he put it: “Paddy's way of saying how much he loved me.”

Tony Curtis

I met Tony Curtis in Rome. He was very outgoing, very nice. I knew him when he was married to Janet Leigh. As everybody knows, his real name was Bernie Schwartz. He got so elegant. He dressed so well. He said to me, “You know, you think you're dressing well, but you're not.”

I said, “I'm not?”

“No. Have you got five hundred dollars?”

“Sure I do, Tony.”

“I can dress you for five hundred dollars. We'll go to Brioni's, and you're going to thank me for the rest of your life.”

I said, “But, Tony, I don't want to.” He kept telling me that he'd heard from so many people how bright I was.

I hadn't seen Tony in years, and I ran into him at a party in L.A. The next day, his secretary called. “Mr. Curtis is having a dinner party Sunday night and he wondered if you'd like to come.” Tony had divorced Janet and was married to an Austrian actress named Christine Kaufmann. Tony bought a huge house on Sunset Boulevard that was once owned by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Later, Cher had it. It looked like a property out of another country, huge rolling grounds, trees, paths, and a big house. The house was decorated like the Great Gatsby. There was a dining-room table for thirty people. He didn't know a lot of the people that he had invited. He used to invite people over who he had heard were bright. That night, Buck Henry, who was a terrific guy and a wonderful writer, was there. I asked, “So how long have you known Tony, Buck?”

He said, “I don't know him at all. I shook hands with him once, but I got an invitation. I wanted to see what was going on.” We privately polled people, and a lot of them didn't know Tony Curtis very well. He just decided to collect these people.

After dinner, all the women retired to the living room, and the men took a walk through the grounds. He had a walking stick for each guy. These paths seemed to go on forever. Buck said, “Don't look now, but I think I see Jack Haley, Burt Lahr, and Ray Bolger coming the other way.” We caught up with Tony in the front, and Buck said, “Quite seriously, Tony, why do you ask people over that you don't know?”

Tony said, “I'll tell you what I learned early on in life. You've got to spend your life with people who are smarter than you are, who know more than you do, who are more experienced at a lot of different things than you are. And the only people worth knowing are people who hang out with people who are smarter than they are.”

We kept walking, and Buck said, “Well, in that case, Tony, what are we doing here with you?”

Tony was a terrific guy. He was married several times and he fucked a lot of women, but he acted very gay in his older age. Some actors and producers who suddenly get rich acquire an incredible thirst for elegance, for sophistication. You're Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, but boy, you couldn't tell now. He asked me over a couple of times. The only time I ever met Desi Arnaz was there. I was shocked, and I mean this in a totally heterosexual way, at how good looking he was. He was very serious. He was in the middle of divorcing Lucille Ball. I had met her down in Palm Springs a few times. Boy, she was one tough lady. Always very nice to me, but really tough. There's a line in
Georgy!
, “tough as old boots.” She had a certain charm to her. The two of them revolutionized television. I thought, Desi doesn't look at all like the one on television. “Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do.” He looked like a very serious, great-looking guy. I heard he screwed everybody in the world, and I could tell why. If I was a woman, I'd have gone for him just like that.

Tony Curtis was such an underrated actor. He was great, and best when he played creeps. He played the Boston Strangler, he was fabulous;
Sweet Smell of Success
, when he played Sidney Falco, the press agent, he's brilliant. He was in a picture with Debbie Reynolds called
The Rat Race.
He was just wonderful. He was so much better than he was as romantic leads, although he could do those too.

Marlene Dietrich

I went with Natalie Wood to Garson and Ruth Kanin's house one night. The guest of honor was Marlene Dietrich. The Kanins were in the habit of inviting so-called legends to dinner, and afterward everyone would ask the “legends” a question. There was always an eclectic group of people present. In this case, it was the famous lyricist, Alan J. Lerner, one might say a legend in his own right; David Picker, who was then head of production for United Artists; Don Rickles and his wife; and myself and Natalie. The first question fell to me, unfortunately, and I was a bit flustered, not knowing what to ask. Finally, I said, “Who was the best actor you ever played with?”

Without batting an eye, Dietrich said, “I never performed with a good actor.”

I said, “Really? How about Emil Jannings in
The Blue Angel
?”

She said, “He was terrible, he was dreadful. All of the actors I played with were dreadful, so I don't know how to answer your question.”

The next question was for Natalie to ask. She said to Dietrich, “You and Garbo were the two great stars of the thirties. What would you say was the difference between the two of you?”

Dietrich said, “Garbo was cold, I was warm. Garbo had no friends, I had many friends. Garbo could not act, I was a wonderful actress. Garbo couldn't sing, I could sing. I had a better body than Garbo.” She went on and on and on. And finally, her gaze bore in on Natalie as she said, “But even with all that, they don't make stars like they used to.”

The room was deadly silent as it came time for the next question, to be asked by Don Rickles. He leaned in, stared hard at Marlene Dietrich, and said, “Who
are
you?”

Freddie Fields

Freddie Fields was the first of the new generation of agents, completely immoral. He was the first to “package” projects, and under his leadership, CMA (Creative Management Agency) became the precursor of Mike Ovitz and CAA (Creative Artists Agency), which would come along later. Freddie collected talent furiously. When I was starting to get a reputation after the first couple of Bond movies, the phone rang one day in my office and it was Freddie Fields. He said, “I want you to come to CMA. I've got a great picture for you.” I believe it was going to be directed by John Frankenheimer, who was also a client, but who knows if there really was a picture.

I said to him, “Jeez, Freddie, I would love to come and all that, but I am represented very well right now by Robin French at IFA (International Famous Agency). I am working all the time, and I am doing the projects I want. I couldn't just call him up and fire him.”

Freddie said, “Well, I know that you are a very moral guy, that's why we want you over here. I tell you what, you don't have to tell him anything, I'll call him and fire him for you.” Freddie would do anything to get a client. When
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
was being put together, he represented Paul Newman. Everybody's choice for Sundance was Steve McQueen, who was represented by Stan Kamen at William Morris. The package was being put together. Both sides agreed there would be alternate star billing depending on which ad was being taken or which country it was in, since both Paul and Steve were big stars. As soon as this deal looked like it was coming to fruition, Freddie made sure that he kept running into Steve McQueen at parties. He would tell Steve what a bad deal Stan Kamen made for him. “You're a bigger star than Paul, you're the hottest star in the business. You should have top billing the whole way through. If you were my client, I would have gotten you that.” Steve left Stan Kamen, did not play Sundance, and became a client of Freddie Fields's.

William Holden

Bill Holden was a guy I respected like crazy. He was not only a sensational actor, but he was a man of the world; spent most of the last twenty years of his life in Africa and China. We were talking one day, I was just starting to get to know him. He said, “Oh, I know everything about you.”

I said, “You do? How do you know everything?”

“Well, I just spent two hours with you. You're a member of the club, aren't you?”

“What club is that?”

He said, “The world's most outgoing loners. I'm a member of that club.” Stefanie Powers, whom we both knew and had gone out with—he had a long affair with her—was a member of that club. “I can recognize them a mile away. You love people, you're gregarious, people love you, and you're a loner. You'll always be a loner.” Holden was, and he died alone. As many times as he was asked to appear on talk shows, he couldn't do it. He was great in the living room, but when he knew the television camera was on him and people across the country were listening to him being himself, he couldn't do it. There are a lot of actors who retreat into a character and they're wonderful.

There was a good friend of ours named Chuck Feingarten who ran the Feingarten Gallery on Melrose. Chuck died, and his wife, Gail, wanted Bill and me to be the two speakers at the memorial, which was being held at their house. Chuck was a very popular guy, and a huge number of people showed up. It was about a half hour before the ceremony was to begin. Bill and I were at the bar having a drink, and Bill asked, “What are you going to say?”

I said, “Well, I think I got it down pretty good. I've got two three-by- five cards here. I wrote down these points.”

And he said, “Can I see it?”

I said, “Sure.”

He looked at it. “This is great; this is great.”

I said, “Thanks.”

He asked, “Can I say this?”

I said, “Excuse me?”