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The following afternoon, Richard Zanuck had an appointment to see Phil Gersh, an agent who looks like a successful former light heavyweight champion and who represents both Wise and Richard Fleischer. Gersh
had no specific reason to see Zanuck, but was merely sounding out the Studio’s intentions toward his clients when their current assignments expired.

“You ever read
Candy
, Dick?” he said as he sat down.

“Jesus, Phil. You’re not peddling that one?”

“Well, you know.” Gersh shrugged. “There’s two new writers on it, Waterhouse and Hall, you know, those English guys. They got a new approach. Nothing pornographic. It’s real cute, in fact.”

Zanuck was noncommittal. “I’d want to see a script, Phil.”

“Oh, I understand that, Dick. You can’t have that dame balling everyone on camera.”

Zanuck smiled. He took an ashtray off his desk and brushed some ashes into it.

“Listen,” Gersh said. “You got anything for Bob Wise after
Star!
?”

“I’ve been laying off him,” Zanuck said. “He says he wants a long rest.”

“He says he wants to do a little picture, too,” Gersh said. “I wouldn’t lay off him too much. There’s a lot of action on the outside and he’s listening to it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Zanuck said.

“He likes it here, he wants to stay, I want you to know that,” Gersh said. “But I got to tell you he’s listening to all this activity.”

“I’ll give it a thought,” Zanuck said.

Gersh rose and shook Zanuck’s hand. “That’s all I ask, Dick,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

“The problems we had with
Dolittle
,” Arthur P. Jacobs said. “I mean the
problems
.” The producer of
Dr. Dolittle
lit a slim dark Sherman cigarettello and dropped
the match into a wastebasket, looking for a moment to see that the basket did not burst into flames. He buzzed his secretary and asked her to bring him in a plate of Triscuits and a diet soda. A trim former press agent with a slack chin and dark, darting eyes, he had recently recovered from a heart attack and was on a diet. He had lost thirty pounds, given up bread and butter and was now drinking only diet soda. The air conditioner in his office in the Apjac bungalow—the name of Jacobs’ production company is an anagram based on his first two initials and the first three letters in his last name—was turned up so high that the temperature seemed almost polar. “I mean,” he said, “if I knew we were in for these kind of problems at the beginning, I never would have done it.”

Dr. Dolittle
was only Jacobs’ second picture. He had made his first,
What A Way to Go!
, six years before and had spent most of the intervening years trying to put
Dolittle
together. His first problem was getting the estate of Hugh Lofting to release title of the books for a motion picture. For years, the Lofting estate had turned down every effort to film the
Dolittle
stories. A born promoter, Jacobs had interested Rex Harrison and Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist and lyricist of
My Fair Lady
, in the project and with these names was given the go-ahead by the Lofting estate. “So I got Lerner,” Jacobs said, munching on a Triscuit. “He worked on the picture fifteen months on and off, mostly off. We painted an office for him, painted his name on a parking space, and then we waited. And waited some more. I get him on the phone, he tells me he knows what he wants, it’s all in his head. More phone calls. He tells me he wants
to see me here, I go see him, he tells me he’s leaving for New York in ten minutes. I make an appointment to go see him in New York, I go to New York, they tell me he’s in Rome. That’s it. So I signed Leslie Bricusse to write the script and do the score.”

The signing of Bricusse created another problem, this one with Harrison. A young English writer who had co-authored the Broadway hit,
Stop the World, I Want To Get Off
, Bricusse was an unknown quantity to Harrison, and Harrison preferred working only with people he knew. But after hearing several of Bricusse’s songs and seeing a portion of his script, Harrison agreed to continue. The question now was who was going to direct the picture. The three biggest names bruited about were John Huston, William Wyler and Vincente Minnelli, each an Academy Award winner. “Darryl wanted Huston,” Jacobs said, “but I figured there was already enough temperament with Rex without getting Huston involved. Minnelli was old-fashioned and Wyler would take fifty takes of every shot and the picture would end up costing thirty-five million. Who else was there? Dick Zanuck liked Fleischer ever since
Compulsion
, so I said okay. Now we had to persuade Rex, so Fleischer and I fly to his home in Portofino and I sort of indicated to him that if he didn’t want Fleischer, maybe we could get along without him. We spent a nice weekend, and at the end, Rex gets me alone to talk about Fleischer. ‘Nice chap, good chap,’ he says, and that was that.”

Jacobs leaned across his desk. “So now Rex had a contract, he was getting more money than God, we were in business,” he said. “Then Rex says, ‘Good-by,
sue me, I’m not going to do it.’ ” Jacobs shuddered theatrically. “We have a picture called
Dr. Dolittle
, twelve million going in, and no one to play Dr. Dolittle. We scratch around and come up with Christopher Plummer. The studio liked him, he’d been in
The Sound of Music
, but it was no secret we were in a jam and we had to lay out $300,000 to get him. So Fox wires Rex, something like, ‘As per your request, you have been relieved of your
Dr. Dolittle
assignment and replaced by another artist.’ Next day his agents call, Rex didn’t mean it, he just wanted a few changes, and so on and so forth. So we pay off Plummer, he’s got us over a barrel with a nice legal contract. But Rex is back and we’re ready to go.”

Dr. Dolittle
actually began shooting in England in late June, 1966, with Harrison, Samantha Eggar, Anthony Newley and Richard Attenborough in the leading roles. In fifty-eight days of shooting in England, only five were rainless. Most of the English locations were in a classic little Wiltshire village called Castle Combe. Fleischer had obtained all the necessary permissions for widening and damming a small river nearby, turning Castle Combe into the tiny seaport of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, where Dr. Dolittle lived. (He had also built a community television antenna, so that he could remove anachronistic TV aerials from Castle Combe’s cottages.) The first morning of shooting, two young Englishmen, objecting to Hollywood’s transformation of the village, tried to blow up the dam. This set the tone for relations between Castle Combe and the
Dolittle
company for the rest of its stay in England.

Another problem was the training of the animals befriended
by Dr. Dolittle. Months before shooting began, hundreds of animals had been selected for training at Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Because of the strict quarantine laws in the United Kingdom, two sets of animals had to be trained, one for shooting in Hollywood, the other for shooting in England. All the principal animals in the cast—Jip the Dog, Polynesia the Parrot, Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee, Sophie the Seal and Gub-Gub the Pig—had doubles. Pigs grow so rapidly that Jacobs had to replace Gub-Gub every month with a new and properly sized porker, and both Chee-Chee and Jip had not one but three backups. Simulating sound-stage conditions, the trainers at Jungleland constantly flashed lights at the animals and moved among them so that they would not get skittish when finally confronted with the high-powered arcs and the hundreds of people present on a set. Six months were devoted to teaching Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs. On Stage 20 at the Studio, Dr. Dolittle’s study was constructed in anticipation of the fact that few of the animals were housebroken. The floor was slightly tilted and fitted with a drain so that it might be hosed off easily. In all, Jacobs spent $1 million simply to train, house, feed and transport the animals.

Jacobs seemed relatively unconcerned that the delays and the problems had run Dolittle up to nearly $18 million, or approximately $6 million over budget. “Everyone wants to be identified with this picture,” he said. “
Everyone
. All the big companies, they want to do some kind of tie-in promotion. You won’t be able to go into a store without seeing Dr. Dolittle advertising something.
You got to figure that’s going to bring people into the theater. I mean, these are big companies. They don’t do this just for
any
picture.”

Saying it seemed to reassure him further, and he walked out into the anteroom of his office in buoyant spirits. “Who’s got the keys to my car?” he asked. He had just bought a new Dual Ghia, one of Hollywood’s most favored automobiles. “I sent them out to get another set made.”

A secretary handed him the keys. “You ought to get a gold one,” she said.

“They send you one,” Jacobs said. “They really do.”

He examined himself quickly in a mirror and walked outside. The Dual Ghia was parked in his space outside the bungalow. Jacobs circled the car. “Someone left a fingerprint on the windshield,” he said. He buffed it off with the sleeve of his black alpaca sweater and then stepped back and studied the automobile.

“I like it better than Frank’s,” he said finally.

“Frank who?” the secretary said.

Jacobs looked pained. “Sinatra,” he said.

Several days later, Arthur Jacobs sent me a preliminary list of the companies with licensing arrangements with the Studio for tie-in advertising and promotion on
Dr. Dolittle
. There were approximately fifty licensees who would spend $12 million on consumer advertising featuring the picture. The Studio was making arrangements for
Dolittle
displays in 10,000 retail stores throughout the country, a food company had ordered 20,000 eight-foot displays featuring Rex Harrison, and another food company had 15,000 Harrison displays. A soft-drink company was introducing “Dr. Dolittle Chocolate Soda” and a national bakery concern a special box of animal crackers featuring all the animals used in the
picture. Over 200 million cereal boxes were being distributed with allied
Dolittle
promotion. In all, some 300 items, with an estimated retail value of $200 million, were involved in the promotion. Among the items were pet foods, cereals, a Dolittle medicine kit, a Dolittle hat, a Pushmi-Pullyu toy, a television record player for children, a Polynesia doll, clocks and watches, a singing doll, knitted T-shirts, greeting cards, sweatshirts, children’s card game sets, children’s luggage, pencil boxes, plastic inflatable toys, novelty hats, balloons, wrist watches, combs, brushes, sunglasses, place mats, ceramic ware, notebooks, tumblers, billfolds, change purses, color slides and viewers, night lights, toy musical instruments, yo-yos, flashlight novelty items, board games, model kits, jigsaw puzzles, novelty savings banks, storybooks, activity books, buttons, play money, children’s coloring books, doctors’ kits, nurses’ kits, animal toys, children’s schoolbags, lunch kits, puppets, charm bracelets, scrapbooks, diaries, robes, coloring sets, sewing sets, 3D film cards, magic slates and costumes.

Mary Ann McGowan, Richard Zanuck’s secretary, came into his office and announced that director Henry Koster, producer Robert Buckner and three William Morris agents were waiting outside.

“What’s Buckner’s first name?” Zanuck asked.

“Robert,” Mary Ann McGowan said, as she disappeared out the door. “They call him Bob.”

The five visitors filed into Zanuck’s office. Zanuck rose and shook the hand of each. “Hello, Bob,” he said to Buckner.

Koster, Buckner and two of the agents arranged themselves in chairs in front of Zanuck’s desk. The third agent slid onto a couch in the corner of the office. Koster cleared his throat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He is a portly man with thinning hair slicked down on the top of his head and a thick middle-European accent. At one time he had directed a number of pictures for the Studio. “I have a story for you, Dick,” he said.

Zanuck nodded. No one spoke for a moment. Koster wiped his forehead again and mashed the handkerchief in his hand.

“I have wanted to bring to the screen a story of great music,” he said, “ever since I first came to this country and made
A Hundred Men and a Girl
.” He looked to Zanuck for encouragement. “With Deanna Durbin,” he added.

Zanuck picked up the bronzed baby shoe behind his desk and began to turn it around in his hands. His eyes did not catch Koster’s.

“We fade in on Moscow,” Koster said. “Behind the credits, we hear one of the world’s great symphony orchestras playing—Shostakovich would be good for Moscow. The orchestra has a flamboyant, tempestuous conductor—I think Lenny Bernstein will love this idea. As we finish the credits, we come on on the orchestra and then we close on the cymbals. It is obvious that the cymbal player is sick. The orchestra is supposed to leave Moscow that night for a charity concert in New York.” Koster paused for effect. He was sweating profusely. “For crippled children.”

One of the Morris agents was examining his fingernails.
The head of the agent on the couch began to nod.

“When the concert is over, we find that the cymbal player has a contagious disease,” Koster said. He wound the handkerchief around his palms. “We can work out the disease later. The orchestra must be quarantined in Moscow. All except the Lenny Bernstein character. I think we can work out that he had the right shots. Anyway we can get Lenny out of Moscow and back to New York. Now here is your problem, Dick. The charity concert must be canceled.”

The agent on the couch had now fallen asleep. An abortive snore jolted him awake.

“Unless,” Koster continued. He smiled benignly. “There is a youth orchestra in New York and they can take the place of the symphony at the concert. We have, of course, tried to get the Philadelphia and the Cleveland and Ormandy and George Szell would love to do it, but they have commitments. So the Lenny Bernstein character goes to hear the youth symphony and he says, ‘No, I cannot conduct them, they are not good enough.’ He will not yield, the concert must be canceled, there will be no money for the crippled children.” Koster’s voice softened. “But then the president of the charity comes to plead with him against cancellation.” Koster’s head swiveled around, taking in everyone in the room. “In his arms, he is carrying a small boy—with braces on his legs.”