My Life as a Mankiewicz (46 page)

The next day, we were in a meeting with Storaro and he needed even more equipment. Dick said, “Jesus, Vittorio. I don't know. I've given you everything.”

Vittorio said, “But I need this and that.”

Dick said, “Boy, it's really
senso unico
around here, isn't it?” That's the only thing he ever learned. He would come on the set and say, “Oh, it's really
senso unico
this morning.” He still said
gracias
as opposed to
grazie.
It was a fun picture and everybody worked hard.

Dick poured his heart and soul into
Ladyhawke.
In many ways, it's his favorite movie. When it came out, the picture was not a huge hit in the United States, but it was an enormous hit in Europe. Terry Semel said, “You know what? This thing's a keeper. People are not going to rent this a lot, they're going to buy it.”
Ladyhawke
went platinum in videotape and in DVD. There are people who just love that picture. A lot of energy, a lot of passion went into that film.

An Audience with the Pope

While I was doing
Ladyhawke
in Rome,
Hart to Hart
was going to do an episode in Athens, Greece. Leonard Goldberg called me and asked, “Could you produce the show in Greece because you're right there, instead of us sending somebody over? Just go out and check on it.”

I said, “Great, absolutely.”

So Stefanie arrived and got us an audience with Pope John Paul at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence. He said a little mass for fifty Polish people. Afterward, the monsignore asked, “Could you wait behind? His Holiness would like to say hello.”

We said, “We'll be very happy to wait.”

The pope came out, and he said to Stefanie, “I see you three times a week.” He watched
Hart to Hart
on Italian television. Then he looked at me and said, “And this must be your husband.”

Stefanie and I were having a thing at the time, and I wanted to say, “Well, if you say so.” But I said, “I'm a colleague, Your Holiness.”

And he looked at me with this sly look. He was so smart. It was like he was saying, “I know you're banging her.” Then he took out a rosary and put it in my hand. He put his hand on top of mine, stared into my eyes, and said, “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make you safe.” Suddenly, I started regressing again, like when I met Willie Mays. I was suddenly a little kid going to church. I was six years old by the time he was finished with me. I was just staring at him. He was a magnetic person. He had been an actor when he started out in life.

Into Africa

In the mid-eighties Stefanie Powers was doing a couple of
Hart to Hart
television movies a year and spending a lot of time in Africa. Bill Holden had brought her to Africa and shown her the continent. There was a ranch called the Mount Kenya Game Ranch, which was run by Bill and his partner, Don Hunt, a real old Africa hand, who lived through the Mau Mau Rebellion. Don came from an Irish-Catholic family in Detroit, and all of his family were into animals. They had a pet store. When he was fourteen, Don had a local TV show in Detroit where he would introduce animals from the pet store. Storer Broadcasting, I think it was, which produced the show, gave Don a free trip to Africa. He went to Kenya and he never came home.

So Stefanie was over there with Don, and she called one day. She always said to me, “Come to Africa, come to Africa.” I'm about three parts lounge lizard. I traveled all around the world with the Bonds, but I had never been to Africa. I would say, “Sure,” and I would never go. Stefanie asked, “Well, how're you doing?”

It was a particular time where a project had fallen through and I had broken up with somebody I was going with and I was feeling really shitty. And I said, “Terribly.”

She said, “Well, why don't you come to Africa? You always say—”

And I said, “You know, I will.”

Stefanie asked, “When?”

I said, “What's today?”

She said, “Monday.”

I said, “I'll be there in one week, a week from today.”

She said, “Great. We'll be at the airport in Nairobi. We'll pick you up. Boy, am I looking forward to this.”

I hung up. I had three people working for me; my vast staff of three, Annie being in charge and two others. I said, “Okay, here's your job today. I just told Stefanie Powers I'd be in Africa a week from today, and your job for the rest of the day is to find me a really good excuse why I'm calling to say I can't come. I've run out of excuses.”

At five o'clock, they all came into the office and said, “We think you should go.”

I said, “Okay.” I got my shots and went to Banana Republic.

The world's greatest airport connection was the Concorde to London—it never was late because it didn't have the fuel to circle, so it was always priority—and, literally, forty-five minutes to an hour later, the nonstop to Nairobi took off from the same terminal. As you're getting near Nairobi, it's dawn, and the sun is coming up over Mount Kenya, and it looks like that great flying sequence in
Out of Africa
where Redford takes Meryl Streep up in that little biplane. I just fell in love. The air smells different, the soil smells different. I stayed at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, which was surrounded by the Mount Kenya Game Ranch—eight hundred animals, a thousand acres; albino zebra, giraffes, Cape buffalo, no predators. Nanyuki Town was the nearest town to us for supplies and food. It's located in Nyeri District. From Nairobi, you could drive it. The roads in Kenya are just terrible. It would take you four hours, five hours to drive it because, God forbid, you're stuck behind a
matatu
, which is one of those little buses that has nine thousand people on it. I drove the first time—I wanted to see the country—then never again. Everybody flew. You went from Jomo Kenyatta Airport to Wilson Airport, they're right next door to each other, like having JFK and LaGuardia side by side. It was twenty minutes to the landing strip, right on the ranch.

The first night, I go to dinner at the Hunts'. We have a wonderful meal, and Don and his wife, Iris, are just great. We all retire into the living room to have some drinks, coffee, and a little brandy. Don opens the window to get some air, and a cheetah jumps through the window. If I had a bad heart, I'm done. It was their pet cheetah, Batian, and that was their way of welcoming people to Africa on their first night. Batian was named after the highest peak of Mount Kenya.

The next day, Don's going to take me out into the bush, and I feel like such a twit in my Banana Republic outfit. Don says, “Listen, I know we've just met and you're only here for a week or two, but when you leave, can I have that jacket?”

I say, “Really?”

He says, “Yeah. It's got all those zippers and pockets. They don't have anything like that in Nairobi, and when I'm out, I need stuff for ammunition, film. I wish they'd open a Banana Republic in Nairobi. We really need those clothes.”

So we went out, and it was magic time. Don would go a little bit off the dirt road and stop the car. He picked up a baby ground clover, a little bird, in his hands. He said, “I'm about to get dive-bombed in a minute.” There were no trees around. Suddenly, out of nowhere, these birds came—the little bird's parents—and started dive-bombing him and screaming. He put the bird back. It was so terrific going out into the bush for the first time with people who knew what they were doing. Stefanie took me around, she was so wonderful. We went to some game lodges, and she introduced me to lots of people like Richard Leakey. I met Terry Matthews, a Great White Hunter who became a wonderful sculptor. He had a pet warthog.

You Didn't Know Jack

I drink Jack Daniel's. They had Jack Daniel's in Nairobi. They didn't have it up in Nanyuki, where I was. So over the years, whenever I would come back, I would have the houseboy order Jack Daniel's from Nairobi, and everybody knew bwana Mank was coming back because Jack Daniel's was arriving. Terry was the preeminent hunter in the early fifties. People would go out to get the “big five”—elephant, lion, rhino, leopard, and buffalo. Bing Crosby was coming over with a bunch of people. He was, in 1950, the biggest star going. He wanted Terry to take him around. Terry said, “This was the biggest thing.” If he had Bing Crosby, he could have everybody. Terry said, “About two days before he arrived, I get a telegram from Bing. It says, ‘Phil Harris wants to know is Jack Daniels available.' Now, in 1950, we never heard of Jack Daniel's. Nobody knew what it was. I thought it was a person. So I looked in the Nairobi phonebook and there's John Daniels listed, and I call him up. I said, ‘Do people call you Jack?' He said, ‘Yes, they do.' I said, ‘Well, what do you do?' And he said, ‘I'm a wildlife photographer.' And I said, ‘Well, for some reason, Bing Crosby wants you to come on his safari.' He said, ‘He does? I've never met Bing Crosby.' The next day, I picked up Bing with all his people. We got to the house and I said, ‘And this is Jack Daniels.' Phil Harris looked at him and said, ‘Uh, this is not Jack Daniel's.'”

Terry had a limp and a patch over one eye; he looked like the quintessential Great White Hunter. He got the patch during that safari, when they were hunting the African equivalent of sage hen. They scattered up in the sky, and somebody wheeled around, fired a shotgun, and took his eye out. Terry would never say who. I would ask, “Was it Phil Harris? Was he drunk?”

He said, “I will not tell you who.”

I asked, “All right, how'd you get the limp?”

He said, “That also came from Hollywood.” There was a very famous attorney, Greg Bautzer, whom I knew some. I knew his wife, Dana Wynter, better. Bautzer was a huge show business attorney and a big, tough guy. He wanted to go to Terry Matthews's. He had his own special-built rifle, a .458, made by Purdey's. Terry said, “I always tested people to see their marksmanship before we went out. These people want to get the big five. So I put a cardboard box with a little red circle in it about 150 to 180 yards away, and son of a gun, Bautzer drilled it four times out of five. He was an amazing shot. So we go out, and the first thing we run across is a herd of Cape buffalo. Buffalo are the most dangerous animals in Africa. They charge completely unprovoked. They're mean bastards. There was one old bull that had been thrown out of the herd. He was to the side, and I thought, those are the horns that Bautzer would want, and we could pick him off without pissing off the whole herd.

“The buffalo sees us. Greg cocks his rifle. I'm behind him and I've cocked my rifle. Bautzer turned around and looked at me like he was really pissed off. He said, ‘You don't think I can drop this animal?' I said, ‘I know you can. I've seen you shoot.' I slid the bolt back, and son of a gun, the buffalo charged right for us. Bautzer's first shot went off his flank, second shot missed him completely. I'm whipping my rifle up, and I hit him twice in the heart. But the momentum was such that he was on top of me, blood flying out of him in every direction. He was trying to hook me. Bautzer had a side arm. He pulled it out to shoot the buffalo in the head, to kill him, but he missed and shot me in the foot. And the buffalo collapsed on top of me, dead. Tom, I've been at this forty years. Animals have done nothing to me, but people? Especially people from Hollywood.”

Terry had stories about taking people out, guys who were supposedly tough guys, to get the big five, and they would be faced with a buffalo or a lion and start crying. They would say, “You kill everything and just tell my wife I did it.” When hunters were really in charge out there, there was almost no poaching, because poachers would be shot on sight by them and it was fine with the government. The minute the World Wildlife Fund outlawed hunting in Kenya, that's when all the poachers moved in.

You didn't have any problems like you did in South Africa with apartheid. Whites were a little richer, but every member of Parliament was black, every member of the government was black, every policeman was black. Whites were called “the forty-third tribe”; there are forty-two tribes. Don taught me all the things you needed to know in Africa. If you're white, you're going to get stopped all the time; the reverse of racial profiling in the United States. I had a little Isuzu Trooper. Don said, “They assume you have some money, so they'll stop you for speeding even if you're not. Here's what you do: You have a thousand shillings on you”—which wasn't much money then; a hundred bucks or less—”Keep most of it in your inside jacket pocket, so when the cop stops you, you reach into your pants pocket, pull out your money. If you've only got forty shillings, that's what it is; he's not going to ask you for more.” It got to be such a wonderful joke. I'd get stopped by the cops and I would ask, “How much was I going?” They would just grin.

There was a guy named Alec Wildenstein, of the famous Wildenstein Galleries, a French-Jewish family similar to the Rothschilds that was heavily into finance and art galleries. Alec owned a big ranch, seventy-five thousand acres, down the road on the Laikipia Plateau. He had a former game warden named Mike Webley, a terrific British guy. Mike asked me if I wanted to come down and do some hunting. I didn't particularly like to hunt, although I'd shot some antelope that we had eaten on safari; I had never hunted big game at all. Mike said, “We'll get an old impala that's been thrown out of the herd—lion food.”

So I go down there, and this is when a city dude who is three parts lounge lizard is really being Mr. Africa. I have the only rifle, a .270. Mike and I and a Masai tracker go out. We see the old impala, who keeps going uphill. I'm a smoker. I keep saying, “God, why does he go uphill? Why doesn't he go downhill?” We're a mile and a half away from the car, in the middle of nowhere. We round a stand of acacia trees and almost walk into a pride of lions; there are at least a dozen. Two big males get up. I whisper, “Oh, my God.” They're half a football field away, which they can cover in two and a half seconds. I whimper, “Mike?”

He says, “Just keep walking and talking. Keep looking at me. We're not on their menu. It's the middle of the day. They want to go to sleep. For God's sake, don't look at them. We're fine.”