by Mark Harris
“If Warren did do it,” says Robert Benton, “it wouldn’t have been the first time. He was prone to do that with people.”4 Supplication was just another weapon in Beatty’s arsenal of strategies, to be deployed as needed. He used it with Robert Towne during Bonnie and Clyde’s long shoot in Texas, when Towne wanted to go back to Los Angeles for a few days. “He literally got down on his knees and said, ‘Oh, please don’t,’” recalls Towne. “Well, what can you say to that but ‘Okay, I won’t’? No one can know the depth of that man’s persuasiveness. It wasn’t an illustration of how important I was to the project, but of the lengths to which he would go to make anything he wanted to happen happen. He says, ‘Save me! Rescue me!’ And I suspect somehow that was not the least of his seductive charm when it came to women.”5
Nor would it have been the first time that Jack Warner had experienced—or relished—that kind of flattery. Warner, at seventy-three, was proud of the power he had consolidated over so many decades in charge and unself-conscious about exercising it. He had had things his own way for fifty years, even when it cost him his relationships with his own brothers. He liked his subordinates—and that included the men who worked most closely with him—to call him “Mr. Warner” or “Chief” or “Colonel”6 (an essentially honorary designation he had picked up in exchange for producing anti-Nazi films during World War II)7—but never “Jack.” “I’ve often thought of the studio as a palace that had everything but a moat,” says Richard Lederer, who worked as Warner’s head of advertising in New York. “There were gates within gates within gates. Warner lived like a king, and Warner Brothers was his kingdom, even if it was a kingdom that, at that point, churned out nothing but crap.”8 And anyone who wanted to get his way with the boss knew that self-abasement, tears, and outright pleading often worked. In 1966, around the time Beatty paid him a visit, Jack Warner was immersed in the planning stages of what was by far the most expensive movie on his 1967 slate of releases, Camelot. Even though the Lerner and Loewe musical had received mixed reviews and was by no means an unqualified success on Broadway, Warner was so convinced that director Joshua Logan’s film version would follow in the path of My Fair Lady that he planned to put his own name on the movie as producer for only the second time in ten years. Alan Jay Lerner had recovered well enough from his tabloid divorce and the disaster of his involvement with Doctor Dolittle to write the script, but it was wildly overlong. When Joel Freeman, who was to function as Camelot’s producer in everything but name, went into Warner’s office to tell him that the movie would run a draggy three hours as written and that the screenplay needed to be cut, Warner agreed, and Freeman went to tell Lerner, who was waiting in a downstairs office.
“An hour or so later, I walk back into Jack’s office,” says Freeman. “Kneeling in front of his desk was Josh Logan, with tears in his eyes. I thought, ‘ Uh-oh.’ Logan got up, never said a word to me, and walked out the door. I said, ‘What was that all about?’ And Jack said, ‘Executive decision. Leave the script the way it is.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? You just agreed to all these cuts—you know it’s too long.’ And he walked me outside his office to a window, looked out, and pointed to a water tower with the studio insignia. He said, ‘What does it say? When it says Freeman Brothers, you can decide how long it should be.’”9
The water tower routine was a favorite of Jack Warner’s, although it’s safe to say that nobody had ever responded to it the way Warren Beatty did. When Warner, during a lunch with the actor, pointed to the tower, Beatty paused for a moment and said, “Well, it’s got your name, but it’s got my initials.”10
“I think Jack Warner found me funny,” Beatty says. “But I think something about me also scared him—I don’t know if something had once happened with another actor, but he never wanted to be in a room alone with me. But all the stories about me not being able to get Bonnie and Clyde financed—they’re not true. I didn’t have to beg, because I had offers from three studios. Well, two, and something I could have turned into an offer, but I didn’t want to be misleading.”11
For a time, Beatty considered trying to finance the film himself. “Originally, he thought he would be able to come up with the budget for the movie out of his own pocket,” says Elaine Michea, who worked as his assistant on Bonnie and Clyde for more than a year. “This was when he was thinking it was going to be much less expensive. We worked together trying to see how little we could make it for. He was very frugal—he lived well, but he didn’t throw money away.”12 Once Beatty abandoned that plan and started making the rounds with the script, not everyone was interested in working with him. He was considered, as Time put it, “an on-again, off-again actor who moonlighted as a global escort,”13 and the studios greeted the news that the “sullen, difficult, stubborn performer who fouled up [scripts] with his demands for rewriting” and “quarreled with directors” was planning to become a producer “with only slightly more enthusiasm than that summoned up for the announcement that Ross Hunter would produce a third Tammy picture,”14 said Life magazine.
Beatty’s confidence as he walked into one executive suite after another was disarming. “We went into a meeting…and Warren said, ‘This is what they’re gonna ask, this is what we’re gonna say,’ and he was right. He’s a great wheeler-dealer,” Benton and Newman told Rex Reed.15 But some studio chiefs couldn’t begin to comprehend Beatty’s enthusiasm for the heavily annotated screenplay he was pitching. “That’s one that I kick myself in the ass for,” says Richard Zanuck, who, deep into preproduction on Doctor Dolittle at the time, had no interest in having Beatty make the movie at Fox. “Warren came over and presented me with the script, and we had lunch in my office. It was like Chapter Nineteen long and had all these different-colored pages—blue, red, gray, green. I said, ‘What is this?’ I read it, and I didn’t have the belief that I should have had in Warren. That was one of my big mistakes.”16
United Artists’ David Picker, who had tracked the project since Elinor Jones had pitched it to him, still wanted to make the movie, but Bonnie and Clyde had gotten more expensive since the first time he’d heard about it. Harrison Starr, the associate producer of Mickey One who had talked about producing the movie with both Truffaut and Godard, was for a time working with Beatty and Penn, hoping to serve as production manager on the film. He talked to the two men in Texas, where they were scouting potential locations, and then went to New York to discuss terms with Picker. “I was foolish,” says Starr. “He said, ‘What can you make it for?’ And instead of giving him the lowest price, I thought, ‘I’ll give myself some room.’” Starr suggested a budget of $1.75 million. Picker countered at $1.6 million, and by the time he was able to convince his bosses to back the movie, Beatty had moved on, and UA and Starr were out of the picture.17 “I can only tell you that when that deal blew up, it broke my heart,” says Picker.18
“I almost made the movie at United Artists,” says Beatty. “But I had a better offer, and I liked Jack Warner.” Warner Brothers ended up offering Beatty a $1.8 million budget, still well below the average for a studio picture, and Beatty agreed to take a lower-than-usual combined acting/producing salary of $200,000 in exchange for 40 percent of the film’s profits.19 No kneeling or begging was necessary, largely because of the efforts of two supporters of Bonnie and Clyde at the studio, Richard Lederer and production chief Walter MacEwen. Lederer read the screenplay and thought it was “terrific”; he knew it would represent a welcome departure for what he called “a very conservative studio that put out one terrible movie after another. Nobody seemed to realize that the audience was changing and we’d better change, too.”20 Lederer knew that Ben Kalmenson, the New York–based head of distribution and one of Jack Warner’s closest colleagues, could persuade Warner to make the movie. Kalmenson had worked with Warner for twenty-five years, and Jack Warner took his advice seriously. Warner also liked to use Kalmenson as a bad cop: When Warner would reject projects, he would often tell producers that “New York” had told him they
wouldn’t be able to sell their movie to audiences.21 Lederer walked Beatty down to Kalmenson’s office with the script. “Kalmenson said nice things,” says Lederer. “But I knew that the minute we left, he picked up the phone and told Jack Warner not to make the movie.”22
“The decision [to green-light Bonnie and Clyde] was made by Walter MacEwen,” says Beatty. “Jack Warner never got into it.”23 But it wasn’t that simple: MacEwen liked the script very much, but he had worked for Warner for decades; he tended to make his case for or against a project and then defer to his boss’s wishes, and he knew that Warner would need a good deal of convincing. The studio had made Beatty famous with Splendor in the Grass, and Jack Warner was still angry that Beatty had backed out of Youngblood Hawke and refused to star in PT 109. “Warren wasn’t a favorite of Jack Warner’s,” says MacEwen’s assistant Robert Solo. “He thought Warren was uppity. The man was, at the time, pretty stuck in his ways. He ran the studio, but he was more subject to the whims of actors and directors than he had been twenty years ago, and he didn’t like it. So anybody who didn’t play ball his way, he didn’t want anything to do with. We tried very hard to talk Warner into it.” MacEwen had his own concerns: Geoffrey Shurlock would soon weigh in with a Production Code memo calling various scenes “unacceptably brutal,” “excessively gruesome,” and “grossly animalistic.”24 But he liked the project, and he and Solo enlisted Martin Jurow, Warner’s head of European production, to lobby Jack Warner as well. Solo also used his connection with Jack Schwartzman, who was his neighbor and Beatty’s attorney; he would secretly coach Schwartzman on what to say during the time Schwartzman was negotiating the deal’s fine points with the studio’s head of business affairs.25
What may ultimately have convinced Warner to make the movie was, ironically, his own poor judgment: He was convinced that Kaleidoscope, the forgettable little thriller Beatty had made with Susannah York, was going to be a hit for the studio, and he knew from the film’s producer, Elliott Kastner, that the actor had behaved himself on the set, allowing production to wrap on time and on budget. By the end of August, Warner “was comfortable that he would have limited financial exposure,” says Solo,26 and he agreed to make Bonnie and Clyde without even reading the screenplay. A month later, when he did look at the script, he expressed bitter regret. Warner wasn’t put off by the movie’s innovations (which he couldn’t see on the page). On the contrary, he thought the story was decades out-of-date, nothing more than a relic of a slightly disreputable genre his own studio had pioneered and used up in the 1930s. “I can’t understand where the entertainment value is in this story,” he wrote to Walter MacEwen. “Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats…. I don’t understand the whole thinking of Warren Beatty and Penn. We will lose back whatever we happen to make on Kaleidoscope…this era went out with Cagney.”27
If Bonnie and Clyde escaped Jack Warner’s close scrutiny until it was too late for him to reverse himself, the distraction of Camelot was at least partly responsible, and Warner was hardly alone among studio chiefs in neglecting the rest of his films in order to concentrate on a single big-ticket entertainment that could prove to be the next Sound of Music. At Fox, Dick Zanuck was presiding over a lineup of movies being planned for release in 1967 that included several potential box office successes: Hombre, a western that would reunite Paul Newman with his Hud director, Martin Ritt, an adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s best seller Valley of the Dolls, and Two for the Road, a sophisticated bittersweet comedy about marriage starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney that a more relaxed Production Code had finally made it possible to green-light. But in the summer of 1966, everything was taking a backseat to Arthur Jacobs’s mammoth effort to get Doctor Dolittle off the ground.
Zanuck had succeeded in shaving $2 million from the budget, although Rex Harrison had thrown a tantrum and threatened to quit when he learned he wasn’t going to be working with Sidney Poitier after all.28 But Fox’s attempts to economize were almost completely undone in the next couple of months, as the start of production approached. Work at Jungleland, the animal-training facility in California, was proving more arduous than anyone had anticipated, since, in addition to teaching a rhino, a giraffe, and several hundred chimps, pigs, birds, mice, sheep, cows, squirrels, chickens, and parrots to perform tricks, the handlers had to spend time simulating the noisy conditions and flashing lights of a studio soundstage in order to accustom the animals to being on a set.29 The American Humane Association (AHA) was taking an interest, writing detailed memos about the script to the studio. (“When Bellowes…flings the skunk away from him,” AHA director Harold Melniker reminded Fox politely after reading the script, “the use of a dummy skunk is in order.”)30 And for every item that had been extracted from the budget in the spring, another had taken its place, pushing the film’s price tag past $14 million once again. The new cost estimate included $276,000 more for animals, real and mechanical; an additional $226,000 in previously unforeseen expenses for the location shoot in England; $72,000 more for sets; $20,000 to pay Harrison’s personal public relations agent; a voice double to sing Samantha Eggar’s numbers; a trainer who was up to the six-month task of trying to teach Chee-Chee, the chimpanzee (and his three stand-ins), to cook bacon and eggs in a frying pan; and $97,000 in projected overtime costs for the services of Leslie Bricusse,31 who had to redraft an entire script without Poitier’s character and make almost endless revisions to keep Harrison happy.
That was proving impossible. After his ill-considered attempt to select his own team of songwriters for Doctor Dolittle, Harrison had finally reconciled himself to working with Bricusse, but the fact that Bricusse’s best friend, Anthony Newley, had come on to the project as a costar sent him into fits of anger and paranoia. He was sure that Newley and Bricusse were working together in Beverly Hills, shaping the script into a showcase for their talents and rewriting it to diminish his own role.32 Harrison wasn’t entirely wrong to think that Newley’s casting meant that the part of Matthew would be expanded. And his disdain for Newley was predictable—he had as little use for a British song-and-dance man as he had had for Sammy Davis Jr., whom he had dismissed as an “entertainer.” But undisguised prejudice, well-known among those who had worked with Harrison before, was also a factor. Before and during Doctor Dolittle’s production, Harrison would disparage Newley, sometimes to his face, as a “Jewish comic” or a “Cockney Jew.”33 Newley was braced for it and, at least at the beginning, too excited about working on the film to care. In April, when he and the cast began learning the movie’s choreography in Los Angeles, he wrote exuberantly to his friend Barbra Streisand, who was then performing in Funny Girl onstage in London, “We started rehearsing the dances for ‘Dr. Dolittle,’ or as it’s known amongst the Hebrew elements, ‘Dr. Tagoornicht’!!* I shall have the pleasure of working with that well-known anti-Semite, Rex ‘George Rockwell’ Harrison,”34 he added, referring to the head of the American Nazi Party.
Throughout rehearsals, Bricusse sequestered himself in his home office in Beverly Hills, rewriting and refining the script, changing song lyrics, and trying to meet the demands of his star, Arthur Jacobs, and Fox. He was beginning his second year on the job and tiring of it. “I am desolated that I was not with you at the Grove last night,” he wrote after turning down an invitation from Newley and Joan Collins. “The strain of ‘Dolittle’ has been beginning to show lately, but I do so desperately want it to be good. This is our first cinematic outing in Hollywood, Newberg, so how can I expect you to be as good as I want you to be unless I give you something to be good with? Deep down beneath several crusts of misery that have been heaped on to me during the past few months is the same happy, laughing idiot we all used to know and love.”35
Much of that misery came at Harrison’s hands. Whatever the actor’s other faults, laziness was not among them, and he besieged Bricusse with questions, requests, and revisions. To Harrison’s credit, he was taking his role as Doctor Dolittle seriously; he filled a June 1966
draft of the script with handwritten notes, some of them directions to himself (“very real despair,” he jotted next to one of his lines), some of them suggestions that Bricusse incorporate more dialogue from Hugh Lofting’s books, and some of them sharp-eyed notations of lapses in logic. Harrison was a close reader and circled lines in which his character seemed to be repeating himself; he also had an experienced performer’s sense of what would and would not work once he was on the set interacting with actual animals. “It is no good taking a chance that something [funny] will happen,” he wrote of a scene in which Dolittle was to stroll through his menagerie. “Each animal cannot do the same thing…. Think cockerel is important. Perhaps the cockerel doesn’t approve of Dolittle. I feel that it [will be] the reaction of the animals [that] gets the laugh—not what Dolittle does so much.”36
Harrison was willing to shorten his own lines or suggest that the camera cut away from him in order to make a joke work, but he was unable to contain his jealousy and contempt when he came to any scene or speech in which Newley’s character had a lot to do. “All the quips of Matthew are impossible and unanswerable and hold up the scene,” he complained of one exchange. “These unanswerable set ups are monotonous,” he wrote, dashing out lines twenty pages later.37
