Pictures at a Revolution
Page 19
Fleischer, by now, knew how to handle his star. “I’ve spent the day mulling over your letter and after analyzing it carefully…I have decided that the sky wasn’t falling after all,” he wrote back. “Leslie is capable of coming through for you.” Fleischer wasn’t a huge fan of the music he was hearing, either. “I’m praying that Flanders and Swann will come to the rescue…even partially,” he wrote. “[But] the situation, while urgent, doesn’t call for the pressing of the panic button.” Asking the studio chief who had fired Harrison just two months earlier to hire still more songwriters would, he reminded his leading man, open a “Pandora’s Box.”32 Harrison quieted down quickly.
Nonetheless, Jacobs went along with Harrison’s demand that Flanders and Swann be signed to prepare an alternate score for Doctor Dolittle while Bricusse continued his own work. The duo spent a month writing songs, most of which were My Fair Lady knockoffs tailored to Harrison’s limited range. One, called “I Won’t Be a King,” included a wink to the actor himself, ending with the lyric “Lash me to an eagle / I won’t be regal / Lock me in an attic / I shall still be most emphatic that I / Won’t be / I can’t be / I daren’t be / I shan’t be a king! / And another thing: I couldn’t bear being called ‘Rex’!”33 When they presented their songs to a sober Harrison in April, the actor quickly realized he didn’t dislike Bricusse’s tunes so much after all, and he sent them packing.
While Fleischer kept Harrison at bay, Jacobs assembled the rest of Dolittle’s cast and crew, hiring Herbert Ross and Nora Kaye to choreograph the film’s big numbers34 and Ray Aghayan to design the costumes. His negotiations with Hayley Mills had fallen apart, but Jacobs had found a strong substitute to play Emma Fairfax: Samantha Eggar, a twenty-six-year-old auburn-haired Englishwoman who had recently starred as a kidnapping victim in William Wyler’s The Collector. Eggar and Wyler clashed repeatedly during the shoot; Wyler said that directing the young actress was “like carving soap,”35 and Eggar didn’t hide her feeling that he was a withholding, punitive martinet who had made her first time on a Hollywood set “sheer hell.” But the result impressed critics and audiences alike; as her $250,000 deal to star in Doctor Dolittle was closing,36 she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Collector. Jacobs was so happy to get her that he didn’t even worry about the fact that Eggar couldn’t sing; he just added the need to hire a voice double to one of the to-do lists he carried around on index cards.
“At that time, I was under contract to Columbia and Paramount,” says Eggar, “and I didn’t have a green card,” which limited the number of days she could live and work in the United States each year. “Every five months, my husband and my child and I would have to move out of the country, with a new house rented by the studio every time I came back. I can’t believe the kind of life we led.” When Eggar got the Dolittle offer, she had just left her month-old baby to travel to Tokyo, where she was starring opposite Cary Grant in what turned out to be the actor’s final film, Walk, Don’t Run. “Given the toll that took on my health and my psyche, I don’t think I realized the scope of Doctor Dolittle, the size and responsibility, at the time I signed the contract…. I never got that message.”37
Eggar had no idea that her twenty-six-week commitment to Doctor Dolittle would eventually double, but in one regard she was already well prepared for the production. A few years earlier, she had signed to costar with Harrison in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s play The Living Room. “Everything was fine until the first day of shooting, and on the first day, Rex walked out—just as he had walked out of many other commitments that he had made. He doubted himself, always. Regardless of being such a brilliant light comedian, he had this gross insecurity about himself. So I already knew this side of him—I had had a Rex experience.”38
For two weeks in February, 20th Century-Fox struggled to cut Dolittle’s budget. When Donald Pleasence asked for $60,000 to play a supporting role in the film and Robert Morley wanted $50,000,39 Jacobs was told to hire the less-known Peter Bull for $11,000.40 The animal-training budget estimate fell by $300,000, a cut that was predicated on wild optimism about the ease of working with parrots, pigs, and chimpanzees. And the pirate ship sequence that Dick Zanuck had insisted remain in the script a couple of months earlier was jettisoned as well. But the single biggest piece of cost cutting was one that had the potential to cause a terrible embarrassment: Zanuck and Jacobs decided to eliminate the character of Bumpo, writing Sidney Poitier out of the film altogether and saving themselves his salary, which, given the new, longer production time that Dolittle would require, had risen from $250,000 to $400,000.41
At the same time that Leslie Bricusse, who hadn’t been told of the studio’s sudden change in plans, was turning in a new draft of the script in which he had followed Jacobs’s orders to enlarge Bumpo’s role, Fleischer was complaining that the Bumpo sequences were “extraneous nonsense,”42 and Zanuck and Jacobs were fretting over how to handle the firing of America’s only Oscar-winning black actor. In addition to the certainty that the decision would enrage Harrison, who had insisted on Poitier’s casting, their blunder would bring the film unwelcome publicity, and they would probably have to spend far more to pay off Poitier than it had cost them to end their two-week dalliance with Christopher Plummer. As it happened, Jacobs and Zanuck got lucky: Poitier had never signed his contract. A few weeks after they decided to cut him from the film, Poitier’s agent, Martin Baum, brought up some minor sticking points in his deal for Dolittle. Jacobs flatly refused to give an inch, hoping to force an artificial confrontation, and his strategy worked: Poitier quit. That saved the producer from having to send out a press release that he had drafted in which he was ready to fall on his sword, admitting that “we simply had a script which ran well over four hours” and noting that the role of Bumpo would have to shrink so much that “it would have been an imposition to insist that Mr. Poitier continue in it.”43
Poitier himself could have chosen to make Fox’s sloppy treatment of him public, but by the time his Dolittle deal came undone in April, he was probably happy to be rid of the film. The actor had not had high hopes for any of the three pictures that opened at the end of 1965, and he was right about The Bedford Incident and The Slender Thread, which received indifferent reviews and did little business. But the third movie, MGM’s A Patch of Blue, was surprising everyone by becoming the biggest box office success of his career. Poitier had agreed to a substantial salary cut, taking just $80,00044 in exchange for 10 percent of the gross to star in director Guy Green’s low-budget black-and-white drama about a black man who befriends a teenage blind white girl (Elizabeth Hartman) and then runs afoul of her slatternly, racist mother (Shelley Winters). His decision paid off handsomely when A Patch of Blue returned $6.8 million to the studio. In promoting the movie, MGM followed the Lilies of the Field playbook to the letter, selling the film as a parable of racial understanding in the press while soft-pedaling anything that could offend southern theater owners or audiences. Print advertisements for the film showed Hartman swinging gaily around the trunk of a tree, with a tiny head shot of Poitier placed as far away from her as possible,45 and MGM’s endorsement of racial understanding proved to be somewhat flexible; the studio willingly cut eight seconds from all prints of A Patch of Blue that showed in the South,46 excising what would have been the first time a black man kissed a white woman in a major Hollywood film.
A Patch of Blue turned Poitier into a first-tier national movie star. Despite Variety’s concern that the film would have “possible limited appeal in Dixie,”47 the movie was his first to do big business in cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte,48 playing well in both black and white neighborhoods. Most critics felt that the mawkish material was elevated by the performances and shared Judith Crist’s conviction that the movie showed Poitier “at the peak of his abilities…the embodiment of a man secure within himself.”49 But many also expressed impatience with seeing the actor forced into one more turn-the-other-cheek characterization. White liberals were esp
ecially eager to take on the mantle of black rage: “The caricature of the Negro as a Madison Avenue sort of Christian saint, selfless and well-groomed, is becoming a movie cliché nearly as tiresome and, at bottom, nearly as patronizing as the cretinous figure that Stepin Fetchit used to play,” wrote Brendan Gill in The New Yorker. “Negroes must find it extremely irritating.”50 “The implicit moral is that affection between a Negro man and a white girl is all right so long as the girl is blind, ignorant, undeveloped and 18 years old,” complained the reviewers for Film Quarterly. “We will have got somewhere when she’s a bright 25-year-old who knows what she’s doing.”51
The critics who argued that A Patch of Blue’s take on race relations was hopelessly behind the day’s headlines never mentioned that the film had to be bowdlerized in order to play in half the country. Nor did they acknowledge that they stood an ideological world apart from some of their own colleagues. In the widespread shock that followed the Watts riots, some white commentators and cultural critics started to articulate a ludicrous position of evenhandedness, attempting to advance the notion that in 1966, the problem of antiwhite anger could be reasonably discussed in the same breath as the issue of civil rights for black Americans. Positioning itself above what it decided were the orthodoxies of both sides, Saturday Review praised A Patch of Blue for refusing to “imply that racial tolerance is wholly ‘one-sided’”52 (a message that is nowhere to be found in the movie itself). Meanwhile, members of the Ku Klux Klan were picketing the Memphis theater showing the movie, calling it “ungodly” and complaining that “the nigger’s name [is] above the white woman’s on the marquee.” The protesters were far outnumbered that day by moviegoers.53
In the winter and spring of 1966, Poitier, thanks in part to the persistence of Harry Belafonte, was becoming a more visible and audible political activist. He and Belafonte went to East Harlem to talk to four thousand grade school students for what was then called Negro History Week;54 the two men paid the bail for five protesters, including SNCC chairman John Lewis, who were arrested for picketing against apartheid at the South African consul general’s office in New York;55 and Poitier made a guest appearance in The Strollin’ Twenties, a CBS special produced by Belafonte that was a rarity for network television, a proudly Afrocentric history of entertainment in Harlem.
But when it came to acting challenges that would take him in new directions, Poitier was, perhaps for the first time, as hamstrung by the restrictions he placed on himself as by the limitations of the material he was given. After fifteen years of being Hollywood’s exception to the rule, he either would not or could not see himself as anything other than a role model. He could barely suppress his weariness with material like A Patch of Blue (“I don’t think anyone familiar with American social life could construe [it] as being representative,” he said), but when opportunities to shake off his plaster-saint image presented themselves, he turned away. That summer, Poitier entertained an offer to play Othello in an NBC special, a role that surely would have been the most challenging of his career. After weeks of indecision, he dropped out, claiming defensively that the role “bored me”56 and that he didn’t want to play a black man who was “a dupe.”57 “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency. It’s a choice,” he said. “A clear choice.”58
THIRTEEN
In the mid-1960s, there were two kinds of young actors working in New York theater: the type that Hollywood’s East Coast casting directors thought were handsome enough to recruit for movies and the type that weren’t. Those in the first group—square-jawed, symmetrically attractive men like George Peppard, James Farentino, and John Phillip Law—were approached by the studios early in their stage careers and in many cases signed multifilm contracts and were thrown into one movie after another to see if the transplant would take. In rare instances, as was the case with Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, the bet paid off well enough to justify all the times that it didn’t. The second tier of actor was understood to be a victim of genetic bad luck, someone who, whatever his talent, could never be groomed or reshaped or prettified into a movie star and was left behind to ply his trade in New York. The studios assumed that actors who looked or sounded like Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, and Alan Arkin would be of little interest to the American public; they might be useful in a comic or supporting role now and then, but nothing more.
Dustin Hoffman was in a third category: He was the kind of actor who couldn’t get work at all. Hoffman had grown up on the West Coast; he dropped out of Santa Monica City College to come to New York in the late 1950s.1 Despite the fact that his parents had named him, aspirationally, after the silent-movie cowboy star Dusty Farnum, he had no illusions about the sorts of roles that he would be able to get. “At that time, there was not necessarily an anti-Semitic, but certainly an antiethnic code,” he says. “If you got Back Stage [a New York theater trade paper], the casting notices said Leading Men, and then Juveniles, and Leading Ladies, and then Ingenues. And then, next to that, it said Character Leading Men, Character Juveniles. And that word—‘character’—meant that you were not attractive: You were the funny-looking person next to the good-looking person in high school. And everybody knew it.”2
For five years, Hoffman scraped together a bare subsistence living in New York City. He got a handful of tiny parts, mostly one-shot guest appearances on New York–based TV series like The Defenders, The Nurses, and Naked City. “And I only got those because Bob Duvall was a favorite with Marion Dougherty, the casting agent,” he says. “He would read for her, and I’d be waiting outside, and as he’d leave, he’d say, ‘Marion, cast him, he’s good!’ So I got a couple of little parts, but that was it. Bob, at least, got the lead as the villain on a lot of those shows. If I had a scene, I was lucky.”3 Hoffman worked as a waiter, as a toy demonstrator at Macy’s, as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and as the only male typist in the steno pool at the Manpower temp agency. When jobs got really scarce, he would sleep on Gene Hackman’s kitchen floor.4 And on the few occasions when he was able to get an audition, he was turned down every time.
“Dusty did something I could never do,” says Susan Anspach, a friend from those years, “which is that he kept hanging in there through rejection after rejection, year after year after year after year.”5 That may have been due less to Hoffman’s faith in himself than to his natural tenacity and unwillingness to back down. “I got kicked out of acting class when I was twenty years old because I screamed at the teacher when she started talking to me in the middle of a scene,” he said later. “I had a big fight with Lee Strasberg in my first class with him….. I have never felt unbrave.”6
Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1965, Hoffman was twenty-seven, seriously demoralized by his inability to land an acting job, and considering a change in careers. He signed on to work for Ulu Grosbard as an assistant director and assistant stage manager on Grosbard’s production of A View from the Bridge, which featured Duvall, Voight, and Anspach in the principal roles. “I had reached a point, when I was doing View from the Bridge, when I decided, I’m not gonna act anymore—to the extent that you can quit something you’re not doing,” says Hoffman. “I thought, maybe I’m gonna become a director or something.”7 But he couldn’t quite let go of the hopes that had brought him to New York in the first place. Anspach, who met him during that production, recalls a lunch for the cast and crew of the play at which he told her with bravado, “‘You know, if I were older, I’d be playing Bobby’s part.’ And I said, ‘Sure, right, Dusty.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean!? I’m fuckin’ talented! Ask Bobby! He’ll tell you himself!’ I said to Bobby, ‘Is he putting me on? He’s the sweep-up guy!’ And Bobby said, ‘No, it’s true, he’s the most talented guy among all of us.’”8
Hoffman impressed Grosbard, who told Arthur Miller that t
he actor might make a good Willy Loman one day. (In his memoir, Timebends, Miller wrote, “My estimate of Grosbard almost collapsed as, observing Dustin Hoffman’s awkwardness and his big nose that never seemed to get unstuffed, I wondered how the poor fellow imagined himself a candidate for any kind of acting career.”)9 When A View from the Bridge, a one-act version of which had failed on Broadway ten years earlier, opened, it began a highly successful two-year run that gave many of the people involved a degree of job security for the first time in their lives. “Ulu would let me leave to do other plays, and they’d flop, and then I’d come back,” says Anspach. “Bobby Duvall did the same thing.”10
Grosbard encouraged Hoffman, who was now rooming on and off with Duvall, not to give up on acting and got him an audition for Harry Noon and Night, a play by Ronald Ribman that was to be staged in Hell’s Kitchen at St. Clement’s Church by the American Place Theatre, which was then in its first season. The role for which Hoffman read was Immanuel, a handicapped, cross-dressing German who was living with an American soldier in the ruins of Berlin after World War II. “He just walked in off the street,” says Ribman. “And we knew instantly he was Immanuel.”11
“I think I tended to relax a little after View from the Bridge,” says Hoffman. “So I did a very nutty audition—this hunchbacked gay Nazi guy with a limp. And I was outrageous enough to get the part. Wynn Handman [co-founder of the American Place Theatre] came up to me years later and said, ‘You put a lot of that into Midnight Cowboy,’ and I said, ‘Hmm, maybe, I don’t know.’”12