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The boom was lowered and Allen walked back over to his desk. He was sweating profusely. Conway, an athletic-looking young man with flaring nostrils and a lot of hair, stood hesitantly behind him.

“Irwin, I was wondering,” Conway said. “Will that needle hold my weight when I come down?”

“Good point,” Allen said. He yelled for the head grip and explained the problem to him.

“No problem,” the grip said. “You let Gary wind the thread around the needle. Then you cut away to something else. We’ll anchor the thread underneath the needle. We’ve got a support under there.”

“Beautiful,” Allen said. He turned to Conway. “Worry no more.”

Conway still seemed perplexed. “What about the timing?”

“Don’t worry about the timing here,” Allen said patiently. “I just shoot for film here. The timing I make later in the cutting room.”

“But are we going to be able to match after you cut away?” Conway persisted. “I mean
how
.”

Allen took him by the arm and whispered conspiratorially
into his ear. “I know a very smart Chinaman, that’s how,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll cut in and out. I’ll use an enormous process shot of you in the background and the giant in the foreground.”

Conway was not yet convinced. “Don’t worry, baby,” Allen said. “I could cut to a Chinaman and you wouldn’t be aware of it.”

Paul Monash stepped out of his bungalow at the Desilu lot in Culver City and let the sun bake into his face. It was only a few yards over to the sound stage where a segment of his new television series,
Judd
, was being shot. The director, Boris Sagal, was setting up a scene, and Monash stood off to the side of the set as the lights and cables and camera were placed. Finally he moved over and began talking to Sagal. The set was a courtroom and there were dozens of extras hovering about. One of the extras, an elderly woman, kept her eyes fixed on the back of Monash’s gold, short-sleeved turtleneck sweater. Suddenly she came up and put her arms around his waist. Monash turned around, surprised. For a moment he said nothing.

“Hello, Mother,” he said at last.

“I thought it was you,” his mother said.

“Keeping you busy?” Monash asked. He was slightly ill at ease.

“Oh, yes. How’s Caren?”

“Fine.”

“And the children?”

“Great.” Monash paused. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Caren’s sister is coming next week with her kids.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes,” Monash said.

“Where are you going to put them?”

“Oh, the kids can double up and Caren’s sister can sleep in the den,” Monash said.

“That’s nice.”

Monash examined his watch. “I guess I’ve got to go.” He leaned over and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Bye.”

“Paul?”

“Yes.”

“You’re working too hard.”

Monash smiled. “Good-by.”

Irwin Allen hovered high above Stage 18 on a camera crane. Down below, an art director for
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
waved frantically to attract his attention. He was carrying a sketch of what looked like a blob, but which actually was a costume for a marine monster scheduled to appear in one of the
Voyage
episodes.

Allen finally caught sight of the art director. “It better be important,” he shouted down from the crane.

“I just want you to okay this sketch, Irwin,” the art director said. Allen beckoned for him to send it up.
When it got there, he perused it quickly, took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, then looked at the sketch again. “Okay one monster,” he said finally. He gave the sketch one more check. “One thing. His mouth. Does a monster’s mouth move when he talks?”

The sketch artist looked bewildered. He wiped his arm across his forehead. “We hadn’t planned on it, Irwin.”

“A monster looks phony if his mouth doesn’t move when he’s talking,” Allen said. “Fix it. A mouth on the blob.”

The first week in September, while last-minute trimming was taking place on
Dr. Dolittle
prior to its Minneapolis sneak preview, the publicity department was deep in plans for the picture’s West Coast premiere in Los Angeles four days before Christmas. The premiere was scheduled for the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and was for the benefit of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Tickets were $125 per person, part of which was tax deductible. After the premiere, there was to be a black-tie dinner dance in a tent set up in the parking lot behind the Paramount. Initial planning called for 140 tables, seating ten people each, with the catering done by Chasen’s. In return for having their names on the menu, manufacturers had donated free cigars, cigarettes, liquor and favors. As a special publicity gimmick, it had been decided to have several of
Dr. Dolittle’s
animal stars arrive at the Paramount in chauffeured limousines. All would be in animal versions of evening clothes and would be accompanied by their trainers. The job of acquiring the limousines fell
to Perry Lieber, the semi-retired former head of West Coast publicity who was in charge of premiere planning. One afternoon, Lieber called up a large limousine hire agency in Los Angeles and explained the situation.

“It’s really cute as hell,” Lieber said. He has a boisterous, enthusiastic voice. “The animals are the stars of the picture and they’ll be the hit of the evening. Sophie the Seal will arrive in a limo, and she’ll be wearing a rhinestone harness and walk right into the Paramount just like she was a star. And Chee-Chee the Chimp, we’ll have him dressed up in white-tie and tails and special patent-leather pumps.” Lieber listened for a moment. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “All the animals will be wearing pants. They better be, or you’ll have some messed-up limos.”

There was never any doubt that the Studio would hold its first preview of
Dr. Dolittle
in Minneapolis. Fox considered the Minnesota capital its lucky city; Robert Wise’s production of
The Sound of Music
was first sneaked there, and with the enormous success of that picture, the Studio superstitiously kept bringing its major roadshow attractions to Minneapolis for their first unveiling before a paid theater audience. With so much money at stake—the budget of
Dr. Dolittle
was close to $18 million—the Studio was unwilling to hold a sneak anywhere around Los Angeles, reasoning that it could get a truer audience reaction in the hinterlands, far from the film-wise and preview-hardened viewers
who haunt screenings in and around Hollywood. The plan originally had been to go to Minneapolis on Friday, September 8, and to Tulsa the following evening, but early that week the Tulsa screening was canceled. “If the picture plays, we don’t have to go to Tulsa,” Richard Fleischer said. “If it doesn’t play, why go to Tulsa the next night and get kicked in the ass again? You make some changes, then you go to Tulsa.”

Because of the magnitude of
Dr. Dolittle
, the Minneapolis screening attracted twenty-eight Studio personnel from New York and Los Angeles. The major contingent from Los Angeles was booked on Western Airlines Flight 502, leaving at 8:30
A.M
. on September 8. Arthur Jacobs, accompanied by Natalie Trundy, arrived at International Airport nearly an hour before flight time. He was tieless and wearing a dark blazer and he lingered around the escalator coming up from the check-in counters on the ground floor, greeting members of the Fox party as they arrived. His salutation never varied. “I’m not nervous,” Jacobs said. “I’m not going to Minneapolis. I’m just here to wave you all goodby.”

“Oh, Arthur,” Natalie Trundy said. “Calm down.”

“Calm down,” Jacobs said. “
Calm down
. You treat me like one of the dogs.” He turned to Fleischer. “We’ve got poodles. She treats me like a poodle.”

“You’re a very nice-looking poodle, Arthur,” Fleischer said.

They milled around the gate, waiting for Flight 502 to be called, Jacobs, Natalie Trundy, Fleischer, Mort Abrahams, Herbert Ross, the choreographer on
Dr. Dolittle
, and Warren Cowan, who was once a partner of Jacobs in a public relations firm and whose company,
Rogers, Cowan & Brenner, was handling the publicity and promotion for
Dolittle
. At last the flight was called. As Jacobs and Natalie Trundy walked up the ramp, Jacobs turned to Fleischer and said, “I just don’t want to go to Minneapolis. Let’s go to Vegas instead.”

“It would be less of a gamble,” Fleischer said.

Jacobs and Natalie Trundy took two seats at the rear of the first-class compartment. Cowan, a short, pudgy man with constantly moving eyes and a voice that sounds somewhat like Daffy Duck’s, sat by himself in front of them and spread the New York and Los Angeles papers on his lap. Jacobs could not keep still. “We land at noon,” he shouted up the aisle. “At twelve-thirty, we visit the public library. At one o’clock, the museum.”

No one laughed except Fleischer, who tried to humor Jacobs. “At one-thirty, the textile factory,” Fleischer said.

“And then we have a rest period between eight and eleven this evening,” Jacobs said. This was the time scheduled for the screening.

“What I like about you, Arthur, is your calm,” Fleischer said.

“Why should I be nervous?” Jacobs said. “It’s only eighteen million dollars.”

The trip to Minneapolis was uneventful. Most of the Fox people slept, except for Jacobs, who kept prowling the aisle looking for someone to talk to. It had just been announced in the trade press that week that Rex Harrison had bowed out of the musical production of
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
that Gower Champion was scheduled to direct and Jacobs to produce for release by M-G-M. “It
was all set,” Jacobs said sadly. “Gower and I even went to Paris to see Rex. We drive out to his house in the country and he meets us at the door. ‘Marvelous day,’ he says. You know the way he talks.” Jacobs put on his Rex Harrison voice. “ ‘Marvelous day. Bloody Mary, anyone, Bloody Mary.’ He gets us the Bloody Marys and then he says, ‘Now let me tell you why I’m not going to do
Mr. Chips
.’ That’s the first we heard about it. It was all set. Well, Gower looks at me, picks up his attaché case and says, ‘Sorry, I’m going to the airport, I’m going home.’ ” Jacobs gazed out the window at the clouds. “It was all set,” he said. “
All set
.”

The Fox party was met at the airport in Minneapolis by Perry Lieber, of the publicity department, who had flown in from Los Angeles the day before to supervise the preview arrangements. Lieber approached the task as if it were—and indeed he seemed to equate it with—the annual pilgrimage of the English royal family from Buckingham Palace to Balmoral. There were none of the ordinary traveler’s mundane worries about luggage, accommodations and transportation. Lieber had checked the entire twenty-eight-man Studio contingent into the Radisson Hotel, ordered a fleet of limousines to transport each planeload of Fox people to the hotel, and arranged that all baggage be picked up at the airport and sent immediately to the proper rooms and suites. He gathered baggage tags and dispensed them to waiting functionaries and gave each new arrival an envelope containing his room key and a card listing that person’s flight arrangements to New York or Los Angeles the next day, as well as the time that a limousine
would pick him up at the hotel for the trip out to the airport.

Jacobs took his envelope and gave it to Natalie Trundy. For a moment, he peered intently at Lieber’s tie pin, a musical staff on which the words “The Sound of Music” were written in sharps and flats. “You’ve got the wrong picture,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” Lieber replied boisterously. “This is my lucky tie pin. You know how
Sound of Music
did and we previewed that here.”

Warren Cowan shook his head slowly. “This has got to be the most superstitious movie company in the world,” he said.

“If they’re so superstitious,” Fleischer said, “then why didn’t they get Bob Wise to direct this picture?”

Outside the airport, standing beside a limousine, Natalie Trundy pulled out a Kodak Instamatic and began snapping pictures of the Fox party. She was dressed all in white and was wearing pale yellow sunglasses. She aimed her camera at Cowan, but her flashbulb misfired and she asked for one more shot.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Natalie,” Jacobs said. “Let’s get going.”

Cowan sat on the jump seat and opened a copy of the
Minneapolis Tribune
to the theater section, where the Studio had placed a teaser advertisement that did not give the name of the picture. The advertisement was headlined “Hollywood Red Carpet Preview.”

“They’re charging $2.60 a ticket,” Cowan said. “That’s a mistake. You want to get the kids at a preview of a picture like this, and at $2.60 a head, it’s too steep.”

“They should have made it two bucks a couple,” Jacobs
agreed miserably. At this point, he seemed to see disaster in everything. “To get the Friday night dates.”

“It’s a mistake,” Cowan repeated softly.

As the limousine sped toward downtown Minneapolis, the chauffeur began to issue statistics about the city. “There are fifty-eight lakes and parks within the city limits,” he said. No one paid any attention. Jacobs put out one brown cigarettello and lit another.

“Are you going to stand or sit in the theater tonight?” he asked Fleischer.

The director stared out the window at the early autumn foliage. “I’m going to lie down,” he said. He patted Jacobs on the knee. “It’s only a preview, Arthur,” he said.

“Of an $18 million picture,” Jacobs said.

Lunch was served in the Flame Room of the Radisson. It was after three o’clock and the dining room was deserted, but the kitchen had been kept open for the Fox group. Many had not yet arrived and others were up in their rooms napping. Jacobs had changed into a dark suit and he bounded from table to table.