by Mark Harris
Fox’s hope that Doctor Dolittle would, as the studio’s publicity materials had promised, represent 1966’s Christmas gift to the world had all but evaporated. But the studio still wanted to hold on to the film’s creative team, and the bigger a box office hit My Fair Lady became, the stronger a hand Lerner had to play; soon after his meeting with Zanuck, he had his agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, finalize his $350,000 fee.20 But by then, Lerner’s missed deadlines were putting the whole project in jeopardy. Vincente Minnelli, Jacobs’s original choice to direct the film, had long since departed, and Rex Harrison’s participation was now up in the air. On April 5, 1965, Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar for My Fair Lady and found himself, for the first time in his long career, in demand as a movie star. Since the late-1965 start-of-production date that had originally been planned for Doctor Dolittle was now an impossibility, Harrison could have gotten out of his commitment to make the film, and he considered walking away. Jacobs prevailed upon Lerner, who had caused the problem, to fix it, asking him to meet with Harrison in New York and get him to agree to a schedule in which Dolittle would begin production in May or June 1966.21 In a moment of post-Oscar exuberance that he came to regret, Harrison had just decided to reunite with his Cleopatra director, Joseph Mankiewicz, on a comic update of Volpone that would start shooting in the fall of 1965,22 so he was amenable to a later start for Dolittle and agreed to stay on board for the moment.
As Lerner’s May 1 screenplay deadline approached, a familiar and unsettling silence set in once again, and in late April, Jacobs got in touch with Lerner’s team and heard, one more time, that “because of Lerner’s preoccupation with the writing of material for his play” (now retitled On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), not only would he miss his deadline, but he “would not be in a position to do any work on the Doctor Dolittle treatment before the first of October.”23 Jacobs, perhaps for the first time, realized that he had wasted more than a year waiting for a script on which not a word of work had been done. On May 7, he fired Lerner and demanded the return of the $100,000 he had paid him to start writing the movie.24
In the 1960s, the producers of the Academy Awards began what eventually became a tradition of inviting the previous year’s Best Actor and Actress recipients back to the show as presenters the following April. So in the spring of 1965, one year after taking home his Oscar for Lilies of the Field, Sidney Poitier found himself at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium again, this time handing a statuette to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins, and watching the prize he had won last year go to Harrison.
If some in the film industry had indulged themselves in the belief that Poitier’s Academy Award would create new opportunities for black actors in Hollywood, or even for him, Poitier had not let himself be tempted by false optimism. For all of Bob Hope’s tinny jokes that evening about how the Oscars looked more and more like the United Nations, Poitier’s career in the year since the success of Lilies of the Field had not changed markedly. For six months after the award, he didn’t work in movies at all but spent much of the spring and summer of 1964 taking his most significant steps yet toward civil rights activism. In New York, he appeared at an NAACP benefit to honor the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of schools. He went to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the landmark Civil Rights Act, which passed in July.25 (Title VII of the bill, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment, finally provided the legal clout the NAACP needed in its ongoing struggle to integrate movie industry unions.)26 And, urged on by Harry Belafonte, who was far more politically engaged than Poitier and was forever pushing his friend to join the movement more wholeheartedly, Poitier traveled with him to Greenville, Mississippi, just days after the murder of three civil rights workers, to meet with Stokely Carmichael and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at a small dance hall. The two performers were followed the entire time they were there by members of the Ku Klux Klan. “Don’t worry,” Carmichael assured them, “if they’ve got cannons, we’ve got cannons.” They stayed only a few hair-raising hours, under heavy security, before returning to New York.27
Poitier, still deeply conflicted about the end of his marriage, his tumultuous relationship with Diahann Carroll, and the fact that, as he later wrote, “it was still just Sidney Poitier out there,” was impassioned about the process of psychoanalysis at the time and spent four or five sessions a week on the couch, talking to his therapist.28 He was less excited about returning to work. Professionally, he now resided in a netherworld that placed him somewhere between movie star and role model. America seemed most comfortable with him as an embodiment of nebulously defined dignity and incremental social progress, and the movie industry was happy to deploy him as a sort of international goodwill ambassador, sending him off to the Berlin Film Festival as a cold war exemplar of America’s open society. But where were the great roles? At one point in the wake of his Oscar, Poitier complained that two-thirds of the parts he had played in movies were “triggered by the Negroness of my own life. I’d hate for my gift—or whatever—to be circumscribed by color. I’d like to explore King Lear, for instance.”29 But he also must have wanted a privilege of stardom that was routinely accorded his white contemporaries—roles created especially for him, which at the time almost certainly meant race-specific parts.
In late 1964, Poitier went back to work. He costarred with Richard Widmark—a friend with whom he had worked twice before—in The Bedford Incident, a drama set aboard a navy destroyer in which he played a visiting journalist and Widmark the tyrannical captain with whom he comes into conflict. The film, shot in black and white, was not particularly distinguished—Poitier himself called it “a bad movie”30—but it represented a $400,000 payday for Poitier (though half of it was to be deferred for more than a decade)31 and a relatively rare chance to star in a movie in which race was not a central theme. Bedford was due to open at the end of 1965, along with a movie that Poitier had started shooting in March, just before that year’s Oscar ceremony. The new film, MGM’s A Patch of Blue, was, like Lilies of the Field, a racial homily, in which a young blind white woman (Elizabeth Hartman) falls in love with a black man. Poitier thought both movies were “fables” with “very little relation to objective reality,” and he had little interest in his saintly, restrained character, who again kept his serenity and temper in the face of racist abuse and was not allowed to manifest more than a hint of sexual appetite or energy. By the time Poitier finished the movie, he said, “I was at my wits’ end.”32
No matter what kind of role he took, Poitier ended up feeling neutered. A race-blind part in a mediocre film like The Bedford Incident was more a step sideways than forward—in a country roiling with racial unrest, why make a film that averted its eyes from the problem? On the other hand, every time he played a character like A Patch of Blue’s Gordon Ralfe, whose race was integral to the plot, he seemed to end up becoming complicit in a fantasy designed to explain to white America that racism was wrong because it meant mistreating someone as free of human flaws and foibles as Sidney Poitier.
The actor’s frustration was reaching a peak at about the time that his agent, Martin Baum, got his first look at the manuscript for a new mystery novel by John Ball called In the Heat of the Night. Ball’s book had been shopped to several studios; the playwright and activist Larry Kramer, then a twenty-nine-year-old reader in Columbia Pictures’ New York story department whose job was to scout outside material for the studio, recommended that Mike Frankovich (who had made The Bedford Incident) purchase the rights as a possible vehicle for Poitier, but Franko vich wasn’t interested.33 Ball’s novel found a taker when Baum brought it to the Mirisch Company, which for the last several years had been the main independent supplier of movies to United Artists. The Mirisch brothers—“Harold was the older brother, who kind of made the final decisions, Walter was the production guy, and Marvin was the accountant,” recalls director Norman Jewison—didn’t develop their own material. “T
hey were middlemen,” says Jewison, “kind of wholesalers,”34 whose strategy was to pursue material that already had a strong director or star attached to it and then take the projects to UA to work out a deal. The Mirisches didn’t spend more money than they had to—budgets for the first forty films they made for the studio generally stayed between $1.5 million and $3.5 million. They were efficient, and they were remarkably productive; in the most recent renegotiation of their deal with UA, in September 1964, they had promised the studio forty-eight films in ten years.35
When In the Heat of the Night arrived, the Mirisch Company was in the market for new material. And Ball’s novel, which was published in March 1965 and received warm reviews, was new, although not as new as many in the movie business may have imagined. Poitier’s decision to play Virgil Tibbs, who in the book is a polite, chatty Pasadena police officer who passes through a town in the Carolinas on the evening of a murder and stays to help solve the crime,36 was noted as a Hollywood milestone: No black actor had ever starred in a detective movie before. But Tibbs was hardly a groundbreaker in mystery fiction, a genre in which black detectives and cops had already constituted a small but strong subcategory for years. In 1957, Rebecca’s Pride by Donald McNutt Douglass, a novel narrated by a black police captain in the Virgin Islands, had won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best first novel. The following year, Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing, a first-person novel about a black private eye in New York, won the Edgar as the year’s best mystery. And by the time In the Heat of the Night reached bookstores, the black writer Chester Himes had already published a half dozen of his lively, bawdy, richly textured Harlem novels featuring a black police team, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, books that would come to be viewed as classics of the genre.
Himes’s novels came from a specifically urban, black perspective (it’s no surprise that they were more attractive to Hollywood in the 1970s than in the 1960s). And although Ed Lacy was white (Lacy was the pseudonym for a political activist named Leonard Zinberg who was married to a black woman), Room to Swing, with its casual references to Marcus Garvey and black nationalism, its depiction of the intraracial class distinctions between light-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans, and its casual mockery of both patronizing white liberals and outright racists, was a good decade ahead of Hollywood in its thinking and far more sophisticated than anything In the Heat of the Night had to offer.37 But what made those novels strong on the page—the specificity and “blackness” of their worldview—is exactly what kept filmmakers away. In the Heat of the Night’s take on race was easier for the studios to grasp. Virgil Tibbs is a foreigner in an unfriendly land, and Ball, who was white, wrote in a tone that was not omniscient so much as it was neutral; the novel simply observes Tibbs and the white cop and police chief with whom he is forced to work without attempting very much in the way of viewing things from Tibbs’s vantage point or understanding his state of mind. As in The Graduate, the novel’s relatively spare prose style allowed readers to fill in its blanks however they chose; and Ball’s storytelling presented an opportunity to place Sidney Poitier in a position that seemed to please moviegoers—not as the master of his own fate, but as a low-key, unexpected, mostly affable presence in a predominantly white world.
Poitier liked the idea of playing Tibbs, but Mirisch, who was both a good liberal and a pragmatic businessman, knew the film might face resistance both from United Artists and from audiences, who were used to crime movies in which, as an article announcing Poitier’s casting phrased it, “Negro actors [stay] on the sidelines…dogging the heels of the detectives as helpful servants or comedy relief.”38 Mirisch’s solution was to sell UA on the film as a potentially profitable enterprise, not a worthy cause. “I made the argument [to UA] that, even if there was a great deal of exhibitor opposition to the picture below the Mason-Dixon line, it certainly would find a ready audience in the great northern cities,” says Mirisch. “And I argued that the cost of the picture was not so great that it couldn’t recoup, even if it were never to play in the South at all. But we had to make the picture for a reasonable price.”39 Coming off of the success of Goldfinger, United Artists also knew that the character of Tibbs—even though he had appeared in only one novel—might represent another potentially lucrative film series for the studio, and the Mirisch Company had included, in its deal with Poitier, an option for two sequels. When Mirisch agreed to keep the budget low—around $2 million—and convinced Poitier to take $200,000,40 half of what he had received for The Bedford Incident, to play Tibbs, the studio gave the project its approval. In June 1965, soon after he finished A Patch of Blue, Poitier signed for the starring role.41
SEVEN
Robert Benton hadn’t been thinking much about Bonnie and Clyde on the morning that Warren Beatty showed up on his doorstep, asking if he could read the screenplay. After the Godard fiasco, it had almost been a relief to stop hoping for anything, to drop it and move on. Even if he and David Newman had let themselves continue to cycle through one round after another of optimism and despair, there wouldn’t have been any time to prepare for this one; Beatty had announced his interest in the movie just twenty minutes before he rang Benton’s doorbell. The moment was disorienting: Movie stars didn’t just arrive in one’s living room after breakfast on a lazy Saturday. And it wasn’t even clear who was supposed to be doing the courting.
Beatty had the advantage of surprise on his side and knew how to play the moment, but the last eighteen months had been somewhat humbling for him as well; he was no longer a cocksure star on the rise, but an actor trying to get his career back on track. Before he went to Chicago to start shooting Mickey One, Beatty had begun a serious affair with actress Leslie Caron. Caron was thirty-two, six years older than Beatty; she was married to the British theater director Peter Hall, and she was the mother of two young children. In June 1964, soon after the film was completed, their romance became public in the worst possible way, when Hall, who had already filed for divorce, charged Caron with adultery and named Beatty as corespondent.1 Since she was now enjoined from taking her two children out of England, Caron promptly returned to London to be with them, and Beatty soon followed her.
Being seen as a robustly active bachelor in gossip columns was one thing; being depicted as a dilettantish home wrecker in tabloid headlines in both England and America was another. The middle of 1964 marked the start of a bleak stretch in the actor’s professional life. Lilith’s poor reception at the New York Film Festival in the fall was, though not unexpected, still disappointing; Beatty knew that the oblique and experimental Mickey One, which was not scheduled to open for another year, would at best be received as an art-house curiosity. And his hope that he would finally have the chance to star in a comedy with What’s New, Pussycat? had been dashed after a confrontation that left the actor feeling particularly stung.
Beatty had fretted about Woody Allen’s Pussycat rewrites throughout the production of Mickey One and, after his move to London, found himself in a series of increasingly tense standoffs with his old friend Charles Feldman. Beatty still wanted to produce the movie with Feldman and star in it, but he was irked that his role had gotten smaller. When Feldman insisted on casting his girlfriend, the French actress Capucine, in a major role and, during contract negotiations, baitingly reminded the young actor that his “personal problem” with Caron was a potential liability,2 the dispute between the two men became personal.* Angry about the way the movie had evolved, Beatty fussed over his billing,3 then quit the project, gambling that Feldman would cave in to his wishes rather than let him go. He was mistaken. Feldman was already disconcerted that at least one studio to which he’d pitched Pussycat had dismissed Beatty as “not a ‘top star’”;4 he wrote Beatty off and moved on to what, at the time, was a much more bankable cast, signing Peter O’Toole as the Don Juan and Peter Sellers, hot from the success of Dr. Strangelove, as his psychoanalyst. “I diva’ed my way out of the movie,” says Beatty. “I walked off of What’s New, Pu
ssycat? thinking they couldn’t do it without me. I was wrong. And I was hurt. I was really hurt.” Woody Allen, whose script Beatty still liked despite the degree to which he had augmented his own role, stayed on the film, and, says Beatty, “his part went from seventy-five pages to sixty to fifty to forty. By the time the movie was made, he might as well have been just a guy on a pogo stick again. They just went on to another guy and did another script. What the movie did was, it certainly caused me to be a producer. I really had been behaving as the producer of the movie and was unable to come to comity with the nominal producer. So I learned. Some things that you care about, you have to control.”5
Beatty wasn’t ready to produce yet, but he took a step in that direction on his next movie, Promise Her Anything. Arthur Hiller’s film, which started production in early 1965 in London, gave him his first role in a contemporary light romance. The character of a charming, energetic, slightly reckless man brought up short by overexuberance or blind confidence—someone who doesn’t have nearly the control of his own life that he imagines he does—was one to which Beatty was deeply attracted; it would define the majority of his best-known roles, no matter what the genre, for the next twenty years. While Promise Her Anything was only a minor comedy, it represented Beatty’s first opportunity to present his own version of himself to the public. In the movie, which was released by Paramount, he plays an aspiring director who specializes in short “nudie” flicks but has too arty a touch to satisfy his boss (Keenan Wynn), who mocks him as “the Ingmar Bergman of the mail-order movie.” The film was one of the first mainstream movies to acknowledge, albeit lightheartedly, a worry that had been hanging over Hollywood for years: The prudery of the Production Code had been causing the studios to lose a share of the audience to European films. “The customers are getting too hip! Times have changed!” Wynn complains.
