Up Till Now (9 page)

Somehow I befriended him. Maybe I thought I could manage him by including him in the process. But eventually he actually became a member of our crew, and he was so big that when other grips were carrying one light, he would take two. He did a fine job, but even if he hadn’t it wouldn’t have mattered. Believe me, nobody was going to fire him.

Eventually he found out that I loved fast cars and horses. “You know, we have a lot in common,” he told me. “I got the fastest car in the whole four-state area. I got a Daytona racer.” He brought it to the set to show me. It truly was a beautiful car, immaculate on both the outside and the inside. He had customized the engine to increase its power by who knows how much. “This is the one I win all the time with,” he explained in the true manner of Southern generosity. “I got my soul in this car, but if you wanna borrow it to take it into town, you just go right ahead.”

Well, that was extremely gracious of him.

“Tell you what,” he continued. “I also got me a quarter horse. That boy is faster than lightning. But you can ride him anytime you want.” He opened up the trunk. “This here’s where I keep the chaps I wear when I ride him. These are my lucky chaps—long as they’re in the car this car’s gonna win every race. I love these chaps. But any time you want you put on these chaps and take my horse for a ride.”

One day I needed to drive to Cairo, Illinois, and I asked to borrow his car. He was thrilled to lend it to me, because I was his friend and that’s what friends do for each other. “One more thing,” he told me. “See the backseat over here? Down there’s where I keep the fire extinguisher. You got to know where that is, ‘cause sometimes, not too often, but sometimes the raw gasoline going into the air cleaner catches fire. It’s no big deal, but if you smell fire you just got to open the hood and hit the fire with the extinguisher, just blows it right out.”

This was a beautiful, finely tuned race car, and on those back roads I could let it out. I had a fine drive into town and on my way back I stopped at a light. Purely coincidently somebody from our company pulled up next to me and shouted, “Your car’s on fire!” What? “There’s flames coming out the bottom of your car.”

I leaped out of the car. Smoke was coming out from underneath. I knew what to do: raise the hood, get the fire extinguisher, and blow out the fire. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered I didn’t know how to raise the hood. I looked around desperately for the hook or something, a lever, anything to pop it open, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The smoke was starting to get a little thicker. I was beating on the hood with my fists, trying to get it to pop, but it was locked shut.

Okay, I figured, I’ll get the fire extinguisher and crawl under the car. I can blow it out from there. I opened the door and grabbed for the fire extinguisher, and then grabbed for it again. The fire extinguisher had fallen beneath the seat. I couldn’t reach it. By now the smoke was starting to get very thick.

I opened the trunk and grabbed the first thing I could find. As
I started to shut it I saw a crowbar. Great, that’s what I needed. I took the crowbar and literally pried open the hood. Then I started beating out the fire with that thing I’d grabbed out of the trunk. I beat that fire again and again but it was much too late, the engine just melted. Eventually I stopped and just stood there, leaving that smoking rag I’d used to beat down the fire sitting on top of the melted engine.

Oh man, I thought, now what am I going to do? And it was just about that time that I realized I had tried to snuff out the fire with this guy’s lucky chaps. I’d melted his car and destroyed his lucky chaps, it was just awful. Incredibly, this man accepted my apology because I was his friend, and because I had enabled him to become part of the movie company. Apparently that was one of the great thrills of his life. In fact, just to show me that he truly wasn’t angry, a few weeks later he invited me to take his horse for a ride.

And he didn’t even complain when his horse came up lame. The script included some incredibly powerful and potentially volatile scenes. In a key scene I had to stand on the courthouse steps and inflame the townspeople. I had to make them rise up, I had to put the fear of the devil in them, I had to implore them: Take to the streets! Stop the integration of the high school! Save the South!

Dressed in my white suit, I told them, “They kept the facts away from you! . . . What I’m gonna tell you is gonna make your blood boil. I’m gonna show you that the way this country’s gonna go depends entirely, and wholly, on you!...Now, you all know that there was peace and quiet in the South before the N-double-A-C-P started stirring up trouble. But what you don’t know is this so-called advancement of colored people is now, and has always been, nothing but a Communist front headed by a Jew who hates America...

“[T]hey knew that the quickest way to weaken a country is to mongolize it...So they poured all the millions of dollars the Jews could get for them into this one thing...desegregation. [The judge] belongs to a society which receives its funds directly from Moscow! Your mayor and the governor could have stopped it—but they didn’t have the guts...The Negroes will literally, and I do mean literally,
control the South!... [If you want to stop it] right here, today, I’m with you. Because I’m an American and I love my country, and I’m willing to give my life if necessary to see that my country stays free! White! And American!”

It was an extraordinary speech for anyone to dare give on the steps of the courthouse in a Southern town in 1961. Luckily, as it turned out, two days before we were scheduled to film this scene I came up with a case of laryngitis. This is absolutely true. The doctor told me if I didn’t speak for an entire day my voice might make it through the scene. I didn’t say one word for more than twenty-four hours. If I wanted something I wrote it down. By the next night my throat felt just a little better.

At dusk that night about three hundred people, mostly farmers, gathered in front of the courthouse. It was a lovely town, the courthouse was on the town square with a beautiful old tree right in front of it. Roger decided that he would begin by shooting the crowd-reaction shots over my shoulder, and to save my voice I shouldn’t say my lines. Instead he read some absolutely innocuous lines to get reaction. Let’s go, Missouri Tigers! We love the St. Louis Cardinals! Let’s hear it for the red, white, and blue! Who wants apple pie! How about that big sale at Sears! When he needed anger he asked those people how they felt about the University of Alabama football team. Roger got that crowd screaming, cheering, pumping their fists, whatever reactions he needed. By midnight most of the crowd had gone home. Being an extra in a movie is fun for about a minute. After the first few hours it gets really boring. So they went home.

That’s when he shot me doing the real lines. My voice was there and I shouted for them to rage and pillage and burn. The following morning Roger and I were walking down the main street and the publisher of the local newspaper stopped us. He’d stayed the whole night because he was working on a story. “You guys are unbelievable,” he said. “You really did a smart thing.”

We did? “Darn right. See that tree right there,” he said, pointing to the tree in front of the courthouse. “That’s where they lynched a Negro
about fifteen years ago. A lot of people in that crowd were there. That tree is the symbol of white supremacy ‘round here. Had those people heard what you were saying . . .” He shook his head. “Your picture might’ve had a real different ending.”

We believed we were in danger every day. We were prevented from shooting certain scenes in the town, Roger received a series of death threats, and the local police and one night even the state militia had to come in to stand guard. We saved the most harrowing scene for the last day. In this scene a long parade of Ku Klux Klansmen in their white hoods drive slowly through the black section of town. The scene takes place at night. We all checked out of the motel and packed our belongings. We shot that scene and just kept driving—all the way to St. Louis.

The Intruder
was a powerful movie, so powerful in fact that Roger had an extremely difficult time finding a distributor. We got great reviews, the
Herald-Tribune
called it “A major credit to the entire motion picture industry.” The
Los Angeles Times
wrote that it was “the boldest, most realistic depiction of racial injustice ever shown in American films.” I won several Best Actor awards at film festivals, but the subject was so controversial theater owners were afraid to screen it. It showed in only two theaters in New York City, for example. That was unbelievably frustrating for me. I believe this was the only film Roger Corman ever made that lost money. His next film was
The Premature Burial.

A few years after its initial failure it was re-released under several different exploitation titles, including
I Hate Your Guts
and
Shame.
Finally it got some distribution. In England it was released as
The Stranger
.

One of the things that made
The Intruder
considerably different from most of the projects I was doing was that Roger Corman did not promise that this film was going to make me a star. He didn’t even guarantee that I would get paid. At that point in my career it seemed like every phone call I got from a movie director or TV producer or an agent began with the statement, “Bill, honestly, this [fill in the blank] is the one that’s going to make you a star.” Okay, I admit
it, I was ready. To me, being a star meant having more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank. It meant security. Gloria had given birth to our second beautiful daughter and security had become extremely important to me. I could see it, it was within reach, it was right there, at the end of the next project.

When I was offered a featured role as a young prosecutor in Stanley Kramer’s new movie,
Judgment at Nuremberg,
my agent told me that this was the one, this was the film that was finally going to make me a star. He may have even called me “kid,” as in, “This is the one, kid.” Truthfully that did seem possible; this was going to be a big-budget star-studded film about an unbelievably serious subject directed by Stanley Kramer. Abby Mann’s screenplay was based on the true story of the trial of four Nazi judges after World War II, but really the German people were on trial. I had worked with Abby Mann on several television shows and I suspect he supported me for the role. I do remember my agent telling me, “This is a great part. You have no idea who wanted it.”

That was the other thing I was often told: you have no idea who wanted this role. I didn’t. But why wouldn’t they want this role, if it was going to make them a star?

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how I spent so many years in Canada knowing so little about what was going on in the world. Until I was offered this role, for example, I knew very little about the full extent of the unspeakable horrors that had taken place in Nazi Germany. But then, almost no one did.

I remember the day I became aware of it.

There were films. When the U.S. army liberated the concentration camps they had filmed the survivors, as well as the results of Hitler’s final solution. Abby Mann and Stanley Kramer required the entire cast and crew to watch these films. Hundreds of people. They wanted us to understand what this film was about. They set up two screens on either side of a stage and turned on the projectors. These films had not yet been released to the public; very few people had seen them. We didn’t know what to expect. I vaguely remember a little stirring, some people whispering—and then the silence. The
absolute silence. We watched scenes of bulldozers shoving piles of bodies into mass graves. We saw the survivors, their eyes bulging, their bones practically protruding from their bodies. We saw the crematoriums and the piles of shoes. People gasped in shock, others started crying. If I close my eyes I can rerun these films in my mind, and I remember exactly where I was sitting and what the room looked like. Certainly it was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen in my life, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the impact.

When the lights finally went on the room stayed silent. It stayed silent as we all walked out. But from that night on we understood the importance of the film we were making. A lot of the cast and some of the crew were Jewish, so this picture had an even deeper impact on us. Every day I went to work feeling like I was doing something important. Stanley Kramer continued to emphasize that we were recording history, and the story we were telling should never be forgotten. And Abby Mann carries himself with a sense of importance, anything he does is important—he went to the bathroom, it was important. Although probably not historic.

The movie starred Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, and Montgomery Clift—most of them working on it for one day. I’ve co-starred in many movies with actors I’ve never met. We had no scenes together, we probably were scheduled to work at different times, we may not have even been on the same location. That happens all the time. But I had never seen anything like when a few years earlier the biggest movie stars had begun making cameo appearances—basically one scene or even a one-shot walk-on—in big-budget movies. The studios hired a star for a small role, a part that could be shot in a day or two, paid that star substantially less than their usual salary, and still got the value of that star’s name in all the advertising.
Judgment at Nuremberg
was the perfect example of that. Most of the stars had only one or two scenes; usually they were testifying in the courtroom. My role consisted primarily of sitting at a long table watching this parade of fabulous stars whose luminosity was fading—but who were still stellar—put to use all of their experiences, all of their abilities, to
create memorable performances. I had a few scenes with some of them. Early in the picture I showed Spencer Tracy to his large office and told him, “I trust you’ll be comfortable in this room, sir.”

To which he responded, “Captain, I have no doubt that the entire state of Maine would be comfortable in this room!”