Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  The often repeated account of what followed in the months before the production of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner illustrates Kramer’s aptitude for turning the story behind a movie’s production into a dramatic struggle designed to enhance the reputation of the film itself. As Hollywood lore has it, once Columbia found out that the film was about interracial marriage, the studio decided it had to be scuttled and used Tracy’s poor health, which rendered him uninsurable, as an excuse to cancel the production. Only at the last minute was Kramer able to save the film by going to Hepburn and telling her that he would agree to defer his entire salary if she would defer hers; their pact thus reduced the financial risk to Columbia and essentially shamed the studio into proceeding.

  But it’s hardly likely that Mike Frankovich or Columbia’s board of directors, looking at the millions of dollars that had been earned by MGM’s interracial relationship drama A Patch of Blue, would suddenly have been stricken with terror at the subject matter of a Stanley Kramer movie. What really happened seems to have been a matter of business negotiation rather than high drama. The studio was legitimately worried about Tracy’s health, and about the money it might lose if he died during production and Kramer had to recast the role with another actor. But by early November 1966, deal memos were already in place that reduced Columbia’s risk considerably. Tracy was to receive top billing and be paid $200,000, not a cent of it up front—he would receive $50,000 upon completion of principal photography, $75,000 a year later, and the balance a year after that. He would not be covered by cast insurance, and, in a line that suggests how well-known in the industry Tracy’s alcoholism, sudden disappearances, and relationship with Hepburn had become by then, the studio noted that “we have agreed to delete the morals clause per Tracy’s previous contracts.” Hepburn was to receive $150,000 in three installments; like Tracy, she would see no money until the end of production. Hepburn also agreed to shoulder the expenses caused by any delays in shooting because of Tracy’s health and to surrender her own salary entirely if the film had to be reshot with another actor, even if she chose to remain in her role. Poitier, already a bigger box office star than either of them, was offered the richest deal in the cast: $225,000, with weekly expenses that would bring his pay up to $250,000, plus a guarantee of 9 percent of the film’s profits and billing above Hepburn.23

  For producing and directing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer would be paid $500,000. When Tracy’s health worsened suddenly in early 1967, Kramer agreed to defer that payment until completion of principal photography. It was money he needed badly, since the years of financial failures in the 1960s had affected him personally: Kramer’s net worth at the end of 1966 was just over $100,000.24 His gesture did save the film, but it made a less vivid anecdote than the story of Katharine Hepburn taking his suggestion and making a gallant last-minute sacrifice—when in fact the deferral of her salary was a pragmatic business decision she had made on her own months earlier. It was an impression Hepburn herself never chose to correct.

  The same week that Columbia announced the cast of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jack Valenti unveiled the drastic overhaul of the Production Code that he had promised when he took office in the summer. The Code had barely recovered from the blow it had been dealt by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when it lost another battle, this time with Paramount, over the British film Alfie, a dark comedy in which Michael Caine played a young, caddish Brit bedding one London “bird” after another. In the movie, one of Alfie’s conquests becomes pregnant and has an abortion, a violation of a Code regulation that specifically prohibited abortion as a plotline. Geoffrey Shurlock had denied the film a Code seal, but the Code’s review board had overruled him, and once again, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, now worried that even its own diocesan newspapers were giving good reviews to films it had rated “Condemned,” had decided to pass the movie with a rating of “A-IV” (“morally unobjectionable for adults—with reservations”).25 Like Virginia Woolf, Alfie was now headed toward a Best Picture nomination, and the old Code was looking more irrelevant every day.

  A revised set of standards sounded like a step in the right direction, but it took only the length of a single press conference to reveal that Valenti’s new Code was going to create at least as many problems as it would solve. The overhauled Code did offer one significant innovation, formalizing a new designation: “Suggested for Mature Audiences.” The new label was the first official step in changing the spectrum of self-regulation from “approval” and “disapproval” into a system aimed primarily at providing information to parents—in essence, the “Mature Audiences” tag invented a class of films that could be approved without being deemed suitable for children.26 But in every other regard, the revised Code merely disguised old problems with new language. Every screenplay would still have to be submitted to the Code authority and judged using an unintentionally hilarious multipage chart called “Analysis of Film Content.” “Check this column if professional character is inefficient and dishonest in the performance of his professional duties,” it read. “Is violence depicted? If so, in which form?” Diligent readers of the screenplay for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example, would then be able to choose from Shooting, Knifing, Sword Play, Strangling, Torture, Fist Fight, Flogging, War, and Other.27 The new Code was shorter, but only because it replaced specifics with generalities—ten semicommandments with vague phrasing along the lines of “The basic dignity and value of human life shall be respected and upheld,” “Illicit sex relationships shall not be justified,” and “Indecent or undue exposure of the human body shall not be presented.”28 When reporters started asking for definitions of “illicit,” “indecent,” and “undue,” Valenti, Shurlock, and Louis Nizer all but admitted that the lack of clarity was intentional, a means of allowing filmmakers more latitude while at least temporarily maintaining the Code’s putative final word on content. “Could bare breasts be deemed indecent in one film and decent in another?” Valenti mused in front of the assembled press. “Yes.”29

  That answer sealed the new Code’s fate before it was even applied to a single film. By trying to retain the notion that movies could win approval by following a single set of rules while admitting that each case would be a judgment call, Valenti invited every filmmaker to push the envelope on the basis of artistic merit. The blurriness of the new Code was certainly good news for Mike Nichols and Buck Henry, whose plans for The Graduate included a scene in which Mrs. Robinson, completely nude, would lock Benjamin Braddock in her daughter’s bedroom. “Shock cuts” to Mrs. Robinson’s bare breasts, each lasting just a fraction of a second, would have been unimaginable three years earlier, when Larry Turman bought Charles Webb’s novel; now, for the first time, it might be possible to make the adult sex comedy that Nichols had seen in the material all along.

  But that fall, The Graduate seemed scarcely any closer to the start of production than it had been a year and a half earlier, when Nichols had temporarily left it behind to make Virginia Woolf. Nichols, Turman, and Henry were still stumbling over the casting of the family they had come to refer to as the Surfboards; partly because Webb himself was tall, light-haired, and preppy-looking, they had never quite been able to clear their minds of a certain WASP prototype. “Blond, all the way,” says Buck Henry. “Sand in the genes, the roar of the ocean—the ideal young couple. We talked about more names than I could remember in ten years. We literally had the master blond list.”30 Over and over, they would return to the idea of Doris Day and Ronald Reagan as the Robinsons and, as Benjamin and Elaine, Robert Redford and Candice Bergen, visually unsurpassable representations of the sun-kissed Southern California children of overprivilege whom Nichols and Henry were so intent on skewering. Nichols had liked Redford since directing him on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park and had offered him the role of Nick, the young professor, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Redford disliked the character’s weakness and declined the film,31 one in a series of poor choices
he had made in the last couple of years: In Inside Daisy Clover, he costarred with Natalie Wood as a bisexual actor whose bisexuality was snipped out of the film’s final cut,32 and his back-to-back performances in the southern dramas The Chase and This Property Is Condemned had done little for his reputation. Now his movie career seemed to be on the upswing again: He had just finished the movie version of Barefoot in the Park opposite Jane Fonda, and he had tested with Bergen for the role of Benjamin Braddock, which he wanted badly.

  Nichols, who had championed the idea, surprised himself by turning the actor down. “We were friends, we had done Barefoot, I was playing pool with him, and I said, ‘I’m really sad, but you can’t do it. You can’t play a loser,’” says Nichols. “He said, ‘Of course I can play a loser!’ I said, ‘You can’t! Look at you! How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?’ And he said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’ He didn’t even understand the concept. To him, it was like saying, ‘How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?’”

  But the problem was as much with Nichols as with Redford. “I couldn’t be satisfied,” says the director. “Whoever Benjamin was, I couldn’t find him. I thought I was looking for someone who could handle the comedy and that that was the problem. But everyone I’d see, I’d think, ‘He doesn’t look like Benjamin.’ Whatever the fuck I was looking for.”33

  Nor was the Graduate team making any headway casting Mrs. Robinson. As it had for Benton and Newman on Bonnie and Clyde, the influence of Jules and Jim loomed large for Nichols and Turman, and at one point they approached Jeanne Moreau, ready to reimagine Mrs. Robinson as a Frenchwoman. She said no. “I refused the part—the woman who is jealous of her daughter,” she said later. “When I think about it, it was a mistake.”34 Nichols never considered Elizabeth Taylor (“She would have been way too young, but also superhuman—Mrs. Robinson had to be human and full of flaws”).35 He was still tantalized by the image-demolishing impact of casting Doris Day, but Day’s husband and manager, Marty Melcher, wouldn’t even show her the script.36 And he was very serious about giving the role to Patricia Neal, the Oscar-winning costar of Hud. But Neal was still recovering from two devastating strokes she had suffered in early 1965 while filming John Ford’s 7 Women,* and felt she wouldn’t be up to such a demanding part.37

  The strangest and saddest encounter Nichols had was probably with Ava Gardner, who was then coming to the end of her years as a self-invented movie siren. Gardner was only forty-three but already seemed like a relic of a fading Hollywood universe. “I was in New York, and my secretary said, ‘Mike, Ava Gardner’s calling.’ I picked up the phone and a secretary said, ‘Mr. Nichols, Miss Gardner’s on the phone. And Mr. Nichols, this is your call.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And she said, ‘This is your call. You are calling Miss Gardner.’ I said, ‘Okay….’ She got on the phone and said, ‘I want to see you! I want to talk about this Graduate thing! Come and see me! We’re at the St. Regis. Come at two.’ I hung up, the phone rings, it’s her secretary again, and she says, ‘Uh, Mr. Nichols, we’re at the Regency.’ I thought, ‘Oh God, this is gonna be hard.’

  “There was this huge suite, and there were actual lounge lizards, like in bad movies of hers, guys with slicked-back hair and pinstripe suits and cigarettes—quite a lot of them. And to my horror, as I walked in, she said, ‘All right! Everybody out! Out! Out! I want to talk to my director.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, help.’ She sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, ‘All right, let’s talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, I don’t think that’s a problem, Miss Gardner.’” Then the actress’s demeanor abruptly changed, as if she were letting a mask fall away. She said, ‘You know, the thing is…I can’t act. They’ve all tried. Huston, all of them. I just can’t act.’ I said, ‘I beg to differ. I think you’re a great movie actress.’ She said, ‘No, I just can’t.’ I never forgot it. She really got to me. But, obviously, she couldn’t be Mrs. Robinson.”38

  With nobody yet cast, Nichols returned to Broadway and spent the fall of 1966 at the Shubert Theatre, directing Alan Alda, Barbara Harris, and Larry Blyden in the musical The Apple Tree. Nichols brought in Herbert Ross to help stage the numbers and could at least take comfort in the fact that somebody else’s movie was in bigger trouble than his own: After six months, Ross was still working on Doctor Dolittle for Arthur Jacobs and was increasingly grim about the ordeal. “He was dividing his time,” says Nichols. “He’d come to New York and he’d work, say, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and half of Monday, and then he’d go back to Los Angeles and the movie. One week he flew off, and we were rehearsing the next day, and suddenly he comes back strolling across the stage. I said, ‘Herbert, what happened?’ And he said, ‘We’re postponed for three days. The giraffe stepped on his cock.’”39

  The giraffe, just before his rumored injury, had made the cover of Life magazine in a publicity coup engineered by Jacobs that showed a cheerful Rex Harrison astride the animal, doffing his top hat to the camera. The image was planned as the centerpiece of the ad campaign for Dolittle, even though the movie was not scheduled to open for more than a year. The story inside acknowledged the film’s high budget but made little mention of the troubles that had beset Richard Fleischer and his crew.40

  In Los Angeles, the Dolittle team was pressing on—but without Jacobs. In early October, as he was preparing to leave London, the producer suffered a major heart attack. Get-well wishes and telegrams poured into the hospital, not just from his colleagues on the movie, but from Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and many in both old and new Hollywood who had gotten to know Jacobs during his years as an endearingly manic PR whiz. “Please stop running around like a man who hasn’t got a picture to produce,” Anthony Newley wrote to him. “Take this warning seriously,” Leslie Bricusse cabled. “You have so much to look forward to in your life and your career. Everything you have worked for is now happening. You just have to be here to enjoy it.” Dick Zanuck cabled Jacobs, telling him to get well by thinking about beautiful women. Jacobs, who had been single all his life but was now enjoying the company of a pretty, much younger aspiring actress named Natalie Trundy, told Zanuck that that’s what had gotten him into trouble in the first place. “Then think of ugly girls,” Zanuck cabled back.41

  Jacobs’s physicians told him he needed to lose weight, and he took their advice, but he wasn’t willing to listen to any other warnings. “The first thing he said to the doctor was, ‘How soon can I have a drink and a cigarette?’” says Trundy. “The doctor said, ‘Mr. Jacobs, you may have a drink, but don’t smoke.’ But as soon as he could, he got the nurses to go downstairs and get him a pack of cigarettes.”42

  Jacobs pushed hard to keep his illness out of the press43 and to get back to the set of Dolittle quickly. Doctors finally allowed him to leave London, arming Trundy with “a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets to put under his tongue and a packet of something like Demerol that I was supposed to inject him with in case he started to falter on the plane.”44 For several weeks after Jacobs returned to the United States, he was ordered to stay at home in bed, a wise move since what he would have seen on the Fox lot was a chaotic production that was falling further behind each day. “One of the main sets was Doctor Dolittle talking to the animals in his home,” recalls set decorator Stuart Reiss, “and in case the animals made a mess, which they did, whether it was a bird or a cow, we had to have the set built on a slant so it could drain. We had laborers standing by with brooms constantly. All of the fabrics had to be plastic or painted so they wouldn’t stain. The furniture had to look upholstered, but we couldn’t use wool. Every night we had to take everything out and hose it down, drain it, and dry it. And we had to have duplicates of everything, even the walls, in case a big animal backed up into it or kicked it.”45

  The smell, both of animal waste and of the gallons of ammonia used to clean the sets, was unbearable, as was the nonstop noise. Birds
were tethered to rails, but several of them escaped, flying up into the netting at the top of the soundstage, where they became entangled and rescue was impossible. The actors were enduring terrible conditions as they shuttled between the Fox lot and the Jungleland ranch, where some shooting was now being done on the sets where the animals had been trained, to avoid the expense of rebuilding them in the studio. “I loved being around the animals,” says Eggar, “especially Gyp the dog and Chee-Chee the chimpanzee—well, one of the Chee-Chees. But then the trainers got hepatitis [from being bitten by animals] three times. So we were always being jabbed with these enormous great big long injection needles.”46