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Jacobs replaced the phone and made a rolling and pitching motion with his hand to indicate that it was still up in the air about Attenborough’s going to Canada.

“Let’s talk about Latin America,” Flatow said. “We’ve got to do something about Latin America.”

“Who?” Jacobs said. He still seemed preoccupied with Attenborough and the northern part of the hemisphere.

“Well, as you know, the pushmi-pullyus for the lobby displays are being made in Peru,” Flatow said. The pushmi-pullyu, a mythical, two-headed llama in the script, was one of the major motifs in the Studio’s advertising campaign for
Dr. Dolittle
. “I’d like to hold a lot of press interviews and say how these lobby displays really help Peruvian cottage industry, and it would really help if we can get Harrison down for the Lima opening.”

“Not a chance,” Abrahams said.

“What if I can get him decorated by the Peruvian government?” Flatow said. “I think I can get him, I don’t know … the Condor of the Andes, or something like that.”

“What for?” Abrahams asked incredulously.

“Like I just said,” Flatow replied. “For helping Peruvian cottage industry.”

“Condor of the Andes first class or second class?” Jacobs said. “You know Rex, he loves decorations.”

“I can only get it if he shows up in Lima,” Flatow said. “If not, forget it. But if you can get a commitment out of him, Arthur, I can start turning the screws on the Peruvian government.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jacobs said.

To further the publicity campaign for
Dr. Dolittle
, Rex Harrison, at the request of Arthur Jacobs, compiled a list of quotes he had made about his wife, the actress Rachel Roberts. “Dear Arthur,” Harrison’s memorandum to Jacobs read:

The New Talent Program’s show for the exhibitors was held on Stage 15 the night before the convention ended. The students performed scenes from
Justine, Hello, Dolly!, The Sweet Ride, Valley of the Dolls
and a number of other Studio pictures. The show was well received by the exhibitors, although some of the producers winced visibly at the interpretation given their films by the neophyte actors and actresses. After the performance, the Studio held a barbecue on the Western street, a permanent set of a town in the Old West, where the guests were serenaded by a country orchestra and a U.S. Marine Corps band. At the barbecue, it was generally agreed that the New Talent School was a wonderful idea and that the students were terribly talented.

Darryl and Richard Zanuck attended the New Talent
School show, but slipped out before the barbecue on the Western street. With David Brown, the two Zanucks dined instead at The Bistro, perhaps the most fashionable restaurant in Beverly Hills. Richard Zanuck was accompanied by Linda Harrison, and Darryl Zanuck by a willowy French girl named Genevieve. The Bistro is owned jointly by some sixty stockholders, most of whom have a stake in the picture business and who include such impeccable Industry names as Billy Wilder and Frank Sinatra. The maître d’ and one of the stockholders is a tall stern-looking German named Kurt Niklas, who has a highly developed sense of the local pecking order, and the walls of the restaurant are lined with antiqued mirrors so that it is possible from any table to see anyone else in the restaurant without an undue show of inquisitiveness. The favored small table is in the corner, under the stairs; the favored table for parties of six or more, right next to it on the north wall. It was to this table that the Zanuck party was led. There is an almost studied indifference at The Bistro to Industry personalities, but practically every head in the room swiveled as the Zanucks took their places. They ordered dinner oblivious to the stares directed at them, talking all the time of the Studio and its various projects. Linda Harrison listened with rapt attention, nodding her head at every point, while Darryl Zanuck’s companion, who spoke little English, fiddled with a cigar, waiting for someone to light it. When no one did, she lit it herself. As the dinner wore on, the conversation switched to the Zanucks’ various athletic accomplishments. Puffing on a cigar, the candlelight glinting off his sunglasses, Darryl Zanuck reminisced about his polo-playing days.

“Dad,” Richard Zanuck interrupted, “Dad …”

“We played a tough game in those days,” Darryl Zannuck said.

“Dad, Jesus, Dad,” Richard Zanuck said. “I’ll say it was tough. You remember that day, I was just a kid, I came into the bathroom upstairs and you were bent over bleeding into the tub. Jesus, it was like a slaughterhouse.”

“Bleeding,” Darryl Zanuck said. “I should have been bleeding. I got a mallet in the face.”

“I bet you finished the game, though, Darryl,” David Brown said.

The elder Zanuck chewed on his cigar. Other sports were discussed and then Richard Zanuck’s days as a prep school football player at the Harvard Military Academy in Los Angeles.

“I remember one game,” Richard Zanuck said. “It was against Compton. I wasn’t captain. We took a bus down there and they were the biggest bunch of guys I ever saw. A lot of big colored guys.” He poured some red wine. “I don’t think we had anyone as big as their smallest guy.”

“I remember that game,” Darryl Zanuck said from across the table. His companion assumed an interested look. “I went down to watch it. I was sitting next to this guy and he said, ‘The only guys with any guts on that team are my son and that Zanuck kid.’ ”

David Brown raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that,” he said.

The following night, the convention came to an end with the cocktail and dinner party at director George Cukor’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Cukor greeted the
delegates and then quietly disappeared. White balloons floated in the swimming pool and an orchestra played the score of
Dr. Dolittle
. Arthur Jacobs stood at the edge of the pool with Natalie Trundy, an intermittent actress who was also Jacobs’ intermittent fiancée, discussing the picture’s upcoming sneak preview in Minneapolis.

“I’m not nervous,” Jacobs said.

“Oh, no, you’re not nervous,” Natalie Trundy said. “Not
very
nervous.”

“Fleischer’s nervous,” Jacobs said. “I’m not nervous. It’s only a preview.”

“All I know,” Natalie Trundy said, “is that when we go to Minneapolis, I’m going to take along a big bottle of Miltown and slip it all into that vodka you drink so much of.”

Jacobs stepped back and studied the balloons floating in the pool. “Fleischer’s nervous as hell,” he said.

The week after the convention, Richard Zanuck left for Europe both to take a vacation in the South of France and to meet with executives on Studio pictures shooting in England and on the Continent. He was not scheduled to return to the United States until the first sneak preview of
Dr. Dolittle
in Minneapolis the second week of September. In his absence, business at the Studio functioned as usual. With Gene Kelly set as director,
Hello, Dolly!
began to take shape. The Studio had bought the musical two and a half years before for $2,100,000 and had signed Ernest Lehman both to produce and to direct. Based on the cost of other musicals, Zanuck estimated that
Hello, Dolly!
would cost between $12 million and $15 million, but
the preliminary estimate based on Lehman’s first-draft screenplay placed the budget at $25 million.

Immediately the Studio went to work to pare the budget back within reason. Department by department, item by item, costs were questioned; the number of extras was cut, the number of horses used in street scenes was cut, shooting days were cut, streets and buildings used in the exterior set of New York City were cut. Still the budget was too high. The biggest item was the exterior set of New York. It was originally planned to build the New York set at the Fox ranch in Malibu, but after months of surveys on costs and the arc of the sun (where would the sun be during the prime shooting hours if the set were constructed on a north-south axis? on an east-west axis?), the Malibu site was abandoned. In the first place, there was no way that the set could be constructed without the Santa Monica Mountains forming a backdrop for the New York skyline. Secondly, the cost of trucking building materials out to Malibu, on top of the already staggering construction estimates, would have made the set budget prohibitive. And lastly, there were the unions. Under union rules, crew members must report to the Studio proper before proceeding, by Studio vehicles, to the scene of location shooting. Though the ranch was owned by the Studio, it was an hour’s drive from the Westwood lot and by definition, under the various union contracts, a “location.” Thus, if the New York sets were built at the ranch, two hours a day would be lost driving to and from Malibu; this meant that it would take four days of Malibu shooting to accomplish what could be done in three elsewhere.

The question was where. The first panicky suggestions
were to shoot
Hello, Dolly!
in Europe, either in Spain or in Rome. Indeed a budget was drawn up on the basis of Roman shooting that showed a minimum saving of several million dollars. But the idea of European locations was emphatically vetoed by Zanuck. “Jesus, you can get away with shooting
Cleopatra
in Rome,” he told me one day, “but
Hello, Dolly!
is a piece of hard-core Americana. You shoot that in Rome and the unions back here will raise such a stink you’ll have a hard time getting over it. It would have tarnished the image of the whole picture.” Other suggestions were met with equal resistance. Lehman visited a number of back lots at other studios, and at one time was even considering the burned-out Atlanta railroad station from
Gone with the Wind
that still stood on the Desilu lot. But Fox was reluctant to spend so much money and then leave a set standing at another studio. Almost in desperation, the Studio decided to make do with the streets and parking lots of its main lot in Westwood.

The problem was finding enough room. The set designed by
Hello, Dolly!
’s production designer, John DeCuir, was physically huge. It involved a complex of sixty buildings reproduced to resemble Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The total area required was fifteen acres. Through part of the set ran a 600-foot re-creation of the Sixth Avenue el, complete with a working steam engine and three cars. In some places, the buildings were to rise to a height of 130 feet, or eleven stories. They were to be supported by 120 pine telephone poles and nearly nine miles of steel tubing. Because of the stresses of the wind against the fragile
mini-skyscrapers, it was necessary to embed all the supporting materials eight feet deep in concrete. Streets had to be paved with simulated granite blocks resembling those used in the period. It was an enormous undertaking and every available foot of Studio space was used. The guest parking lot in front of the administration building was closed. The facing of the sound stages and even that of the administration building were transformed into lower Manhattan. Service roads were torn up and repaved to simulate the Gay 90’s. The one set, which would be struck at the completion of
Hello, Dolly!
, cost $1.6 million.

While
Hello, Dolly!
was being readied for production,
Dr. Dolittle
was in the final stages of scoring and mixing prior to the Minneapolis sneak preview. The picture, as befitted its $18 million budget, was scheduled to be the Studio’s major contender in the Academy Award race, and both Arthur Jacobs and the publicity department were deep in plans and campaigns to promote the film. A few days after the convention, Jacobs prepared an agenda of items he was to discuss in New York with Jonas Rosenfield, the vice president in charge of advertising and promotion, and other Manhattan-based Studio executives. One section of the agenda was titled