Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  A degree of rancor was beginning to become apparent even in the Dolittle media blitz. Bricusse broke what had been a tacit code of silence by calling Rex Harrison a “bully” and a “snob” in a New York Times interview and also by remarking, “Last week the producer called me up and said blandly, ‘Cut $1.5 million out of the budget by Thursday.’”47 That may have been true, but by the fall of 1966, Doctor Dolittle’s budget was, despite Jacobs’s entreaties, going up, not down. When the crew had returned from Castle Combe, they had hoped to finish everything they needed to shoot on the lot and then fly to St. Lucia, the Caribbean island that was to double for Africa, where Doctor Dolittle sails on his ship, the Flounder, in the second half of the movie. But wrapping the California shoot in time had become impossible; they would now have to leave for St. Lucia in October, shoot there for several weeks, and return to Los Angeles one more time to complete the movie on the lot in early 1967.

  Some at 20th Century-Fox advised scrapping the St. Lucia shoot altogether, since the island did not offer a climate that was any more welcoming than Castle Combe’s had been. “I think it is essential…that we consider ways and means of doing some of the Flounder work on the stage [in Los Angeles],” warned Stan Hough, the head of Fox’s Production Department, in a September memo. “Even if we go to St. Lucia, I think it is very possible, in view of the weather reports…that we would be forced to do some shooting back here.”48 Hough’s warnings were ignored; Fleischer wanted as much of Dolittle shot on location as possible, and an advance team flew to St. Lucia in mid-October, with the actors preparing to follow them at the end of the month. Harrison would live on a yacht, where he would be joined by Rachel Roberts, and Anthony Newley made plans to bring his wife, Joan Collins, and their two young children on what sounded like a pleasant tropical adventure. A telegram from unit production manager William Eckhardt quickly dissuaded him. “Recommend Newley should not bring children,” he wrote. “Insect terrible from very wet summer STOP everyone covered in welts and sores two people bad infections from bites STOP six people ill last week from dysentery.” The cable went on to implore Fox’s L.A. office to charter a small cargo plane and send twelve dozen cans of insect repellent immediately.49

  The shoot in St. Lucia turned out to be even more of a horror than the crew had anticipated, and not just because of the swarms of stinging insects, or the tropical storms that seemed to shut down production every second day, or the fleas that lived in the sand that the Dolittle crew had found on a remote part of the island and trucked to the set by the ton because they liked its pinkish color.50 As filming in St. Lucia dragged on, Harrison sank into an especially foul temper, and the rift between him and his younger costars was now irreparable. “I often had a wonderful time with Rex,” says Eggar. “I mean, yes, he was unkind and vitriolic and very mean-spirited, but he was also very funny—until, of course, he turned on me, too. Rex separated himself from all us. In St. Lucia he rented a beautiful three-masted schooner that sat off in the bay while we were all in the hotel, and that was his fault. I mean, part of it was an age thing—he did think that we were incredibly stupid and called us that many times.”51 Newley became a particular target of Harrison’s: Insults like “Cockney Jew” and “sewer rat” started to fly more frequently.52 At one point months into the St. Lucia shoot, Fleischer was filming a scene with Newley on the water; Harrison ruined the shot by steering his schooner into camera range and refusing to move it for two hours.53

  “That was more why we ganged up on him,” says Eggar, “his despicable treatment of Tony. Tony’s relationship with Leslie [Bricusse] played like the black night in Rex’s psyche…. He didn’t have a friend, and he didn’t have anyone to bounce his fears off of. And as with all insecure bullies, they lash out. It’s only once you stand up to them that they back down. And nobody stood up to him.”54

  “Rex was a terrific asset,” says producer Mort Abrahams. “but you never knew which Rex you were meeting in the morning when you came to the set. He was so volatile.”55

  Harrison’s mood only seemed to worsen once Roberts, still drinking heavily and more unstable than ever, flew down from New York. When Geoffrey Holder, who had been hired to play William Shakespeare X (an altered, greatly abridged reconception of the character of Bumpo), arrived on the island, he was already on his guard: The Trinidad-born actor-director-choreographer had little patience for any behavior that had a whiff of British colonialism or racism. Roberts was rude to him almost immediately (“I don’t have to talk to you, do I?” she asked him by way of introduction), and during a cocktail party given for the cast and crew on Harrison’s yacht, Holder had a run-in with a young member of Harrison’s entourage. “I’m standing on the deck, all dressed up, and I see St. Lucians loading a banana boat with bananas. And this English girl says to me, ‘How do you like being on this side of the boat?’ Well, what could I expect.”

  Harrison and Roberts spent most evenings boozing and brawling, and their high-volume showdowns, which carried across the water, became the subject of daily gossip. “She was an alcoholic, he was whatever he was, and they were fighting like cats and dogs. The caretakers of the seals would come running out thinking the animals were making noise, but it was Rex and Rachel,” says Holder.56 One night, Roberts faked a suicide attempt by leaving her shoes on the deck, wrapping her clothes around a log, screaming, and throwing it into the bay;57 on another evening, she got drunk and jumped into the water, swimming as fast as she could toward the seal tank with the intention of freeing them. “We should have taken out an insurance policy against your fucking wife!” Jacobs later told his star.58

  By late November, the shoot was already estimated to be thirty-nine days behind schedule,59 and Fleischer and Mort Abrahams started making plans to postpone even more of the remaining production until what would now be an extended Los Angeles shoot at the beginning of 1967. Most of the actors got sick at least once in St. Lucia; William Dix, the ten-year-old English boy playing Matthew Mugg’s pal Tommy Stubbins, got the flu, and Newley was hit particularly hard. “I told you don’t drink [the] water,” Joan Collins cabled him. “Shape up, ace!”60 Newley missed so many days that at one point Jacobs wrote to him, “One more illness and Norman Wisdom steps in…with new music by Lionel Bart.”61 Even a scene as innocuous as the movie’s planned finale, in which Dolittle and his friends were to sail away in a giant pink sea snail, managed to generate a catastrophe when local St. Lucians, whose children had recently been plagued by a persistent gastrointestinal illness caused by freshwater snails, took the construction of the giant snail ship off the beach as an insult and threw rocks at it.62

  Jacobs, still on the mend, was alarmed by some of the footage he was seeing as it was shipped back to Los Angeles. He told Abrahams that he was “devastated” by the garish plastic look of the sea snail, complaining, “How is it possible to go so far wrong from what we saw in the prop shop? Even in black and white long shots it does not look right, so certainly in seventy [millimeter] it will look worse.”63

  Bricusse, vacationing on Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico and happy not to be a part of the “Devil’s Island existence”64 his friend Newley was enduring on St. Lucia, was finally free of Doctor Dolittle after eighteen months of work—at least, so he thought. Dick Zanuck, impressed with his endurance and flexibility, offered him a job writing the screenplay for Fox’s other big 1967 production, Valley of the Dolls, but Bricusse passed;65 “Chapter Nineteen, 659 pages of screenplay and four thousand songs,” he told Jacobs, were enough for him.66 But he had time to draft one more number, just for the eyes of the eternally optimistic producer whom everyone called Apjac, to be sung to the tune of The Sound of Music’s “Sixteen, Going on Seventeen”:

  The budget’s sixteen,

  Going on seventeen

  Apjac, it’s time to think

  Better beware

  Be canny and careful

  Apjac, we’re on the brink.

  When it was thirteen

  Going on fourteen

/>   Everyone wore a smile.

  Let’s stop pretending—

  You started spending—

  Like it was out of style.

  Totally unprepared were you

  For rain in Castle Combe

  Timid and shy and scared are you

  When entering Zanuck’s room

  To tell him

  Now it’s nineteen going on twenty

  Please will you sign those checks?

  Though this film is costing us plenty

  Most of it goes to Rex!67

  NINETEEN

  In his room at the North Park Motor Inn in Dallas, Robert Towne spent most of his evenings writing. Every morning, he waited in the motel parking lot with the rest of Bonnie and Clyde’s cast and crew for the buses to come and drive them several miles to that day’s location. The farther they got from Dallas, the more arid, semiabandoned hamlets they’d find—each with its hollowed-out two-story buildings, a beauty parlor, and a luncheonette opening onto a mostly empty town square, all of which were largely unchanged since the depths of the Depression.1 “Pilot Point Is Proud to Have Been Selected to Participate in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’” cheered one local newspaper ad, in which local businessmen pooled their dollars to run a picture of the present-day town in order to reassure readers that it was now “peaceful.”2 “All the young people had left,” says Estelle Parsons. “These towns were really finished. Each one had one coffee shop, full of old men, just sitting around.”3

  Sometimes Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty would find themselves shooting near the same streets where, thirty-three years earlier, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had become famous. Bystanders would shyly introduce themselves, and every one of them had a story: The middle-aged woman in white gloves was a little girl who saw Bonnie and Clyde run out of the bank and jump into their getaway car; the man standing off to one side waiting to meet Penn was Clyde Barrow’s nephew Duryl. What had seemed to Robert Benton and David Newman to be a story carved out of the French New Wave and American pop-cultural debris—gangster movies, detective magazines, comic strips—was, to the local Texans who kept showing up, just a part of their history, a brush with notoriety that had taken place not so long ago. “Life was shaping art,” Towne wrote later. “Warren and Faye were not working on Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde were working on them.”4 Towne wasn’t doing a lot of on-the-spot rewriting, although on many afternoons he’d leave shooting early to go back to the motel and fine-tune a scene that Penn and Beatty were planning to film the next day.5 “Robert, why don’t you come down to Dallas while we’re doing the movie?” Beatty had said to him. “We can work on Shampoo while we’re there.”6 It had sounded like a reasonable idea. But as the autumn days rolled by and Shampoo remained largely untouched, Towne started to realize why he was really in Texas: His job was to listen to Beatty and Penn fight.

  “I can be obnoxious,” says Beatty. “And I knew that I would be hard to take in a one-on-one dialectic with Arthur, that finally he would say, ‘I just can’t take it anymore.’ Three heads are better than two, because if two people disagree, it’s more possible for it to become personal. You need someone to say, ‘Hey, schmuck!’ So Robert really was very helpful when we were kicking things around. He made the arguments, which I would prefer to call discussions, very productive.”7

  “I would call it fighting,” says Estelle Parsons. “Every morning we would go to work, and Warren and Arthur would fight for half an hour or an hour. We would be all ready to go and they would start serious, professional, artistic fighting. I remember that when Gene [Wilder] and Evans [Evans] came to do their scene, Gene said, ‘My God, is this movie ever going to get made? What’s going on here? What are they doing?’ We laughed because we were so used to this happening that we’d forgotten they did it by then. And those fights—the creative energy of them—were so important to the movie.”8

  “Was it tense? Are you kidding? It was excruciating!” says script supervisor John Dutton. “Beatty used to ask these questions of Penn that would sound silly, but there was always something behind it. He was fishing for something.”9

  Beatty had tried to plan his entire career by studying the work of directors he admired, but as Bonnie and Clyde’s producer, suddenly he was feeling impatient with auteurism. “To attribute [movies] wholly to their directors—not to the actors, not to the producer, not [to] the leading lady…well, that’s bullshit!” he fumed. “Those pictures were made by directors, writers, and sound men and cameramen and actors and so forth, but suddenly, it’s ‘Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown.’…It’s not healthy.”10 Beatty and Penn’s discussions often concerned aspects of the script as small as which word in a line should be emphasized or as unquantifiable as the tone of a particular moment. A flourish, a camera angle, a reaction, a grace note—no issue was too trivial to stop both men in their tracks. “What else is making a movie,” Beatty said, “except attention to detail?”11

  Although he was Penn’s boss, Beatty knew better than to tell him how to direct, at least most of the time. “He was always at Arthur Penn’s ear about everything,” says production designer Dean Tavoularis. “The wardrobe, a dolly shot, when to change a setup—he was hands-on, a very active producer. But I would never describe it as unfriendly.”12 Frequently, the conflicts would be put on hold only because shooting had to begin or the day would be lost completely; that night at dinner, Beatty and Penn would start again, often calling Towne over to step in and to take notes. “They were burning the midnight oil on that thing,” says Dutton. “They’d come out with new pages every day.”13

  Penn and Beatty’s relationship during the shoot never fractured; although Penn says that “very difficult situations emerged almost daily,” Beatty usually knew when to quit pressing a point, perhaps because there was no producer around to stop him but himself. “The fact that Warren had nursed this material, that it was within his control, paradoxically allowed him to give up control more easily to a director,” says Towne. “He picked Arthur, and he trusted Arthur more easily than he would have if he had had to just show up for a director as an employee—he had done that before, and it hadn’t worked for him.”14

  Penn and Beatty had far more to contend with than their own disputes: Bonnie and Clyde was not one of those shoots in which a remote location and a lack of local entertainment foster a spirit of camaraderie. Estelle Parsons was quarreling with her on-screen husband, Gene Hackman, who was nursing his own resentments and grudges. The maverick Tavoularis was at loggerheads with the crusty, aging cinematographer Burnett Guffey. And Faye Dunaway’s taut nerves and shaky emotional state were evident to everyone from the day she showed up on the set.

  When Dunaway was cast, Penn and Beatty had worried about the weight she had put on during her unhappy stretch working for Preminger, and Penn told her she’d have to slim down. Just hours before Dunaway met Penn and Beatty, she had been at the beach with director Curtis Hanson, then a young film journalist and photographer, and the photographs he had taken of her that day convinced Beatty and Penn that they had made the right choice. “She was very overweight,” said Hanson, “but the way I shot her, backlit with her hair back, she looked softer and thinner.” But the actress, having been turned into a blond sex kitten for The Happening and then a drab farmwife for Hurry Sundown, was already insecure about her appearance, and the suggestion that she might not be physically attractive enough to play Bonnie was devastating to her. (“She doesn’t look like much,” an indifferent Beatty told Hanson when she was cast.)15 In the few weeks before production started, Dunaway worked relentlessly to lose twenty-five pounds. By the time she arrived in Texas, she was rail-thin and both physically and emotionally fragile. “She went on a starvation diet,” says Penn. “I mean, not eating anything.”16

  In her autobiography, Dunaway insists that she “spent weeks walking around my apartment and working out wearing a twelve-pound weight belt, with smaller weights around my wrists,”17 but several people who worked with her on Bonnie and Clyde say
she was also taking diet pills, a far more common way for an actress to lose weight in the preaerobics era. “What she went through…” says Theadora Van Runkle. “Once I took one of her diet pills and I stayed awake for days. You couldn’t have any fat on you at all—it was just awful. So for actresses back then, it meant diet pills, water-retention pills, all that stuff. And remember, she was next to Warren, who was terribly pretty himself. It wasn’t easy for her.”18 Beatty’s assistant Elaine Michea remembers that Dunaway lost so much additional weight during the shoot that Van Runkle’s costumes for her had to be re-sewn. “‘Fadin’ Away.’ That’s what we used to call Faye on the set, she was so thin,” says Dutton.19

  Dunaway didn’t have a lot of friends on the set; she blew hot and cold with the crew depending on her mood, and they noticed. Her self-absorption worked both for and against her. On screen, she seems almost electrically charged as Bonnie, deeply in touch with the character’s restlessness, her desire to escape from her slow life and into a fast car, her hunger for thrills, her need to dramatize herself, and the speed with which her giddiness can turn to terror or anger; she channeled whatever anxiety or fear she was feeling off camera right into her performance. “I often say that the last role I played that really touched me and where I was able to access what I really am was Bonnie,” she said thirty-five years later, “which is kind of sad when you think about how early in my career that was.”20 At its strongest, Dunaway’s connection to the “yearning, edgy, ambitious southern girl who wanted to get out” was uncanny. “I knew everything about wanting to get out,” she wrote. “Arthur…said he always felt in working with me that my talent was crying out for expression, and I was crying out for fame.”21 But Dunaway tried everyone’s patience getting there. “Nobody was too keen on Faye,” recalls Parsons. “We were all kind of annoyed with her. We’d be ready to do a shot, and Faye would need the makeup woman. We’d be all set to roll, and oops, Faye would have to have her hair combed. There was a lot of that. We’d go in early to get made-up, five or six in the morning, and she’d be there with rock and roll blaring. Listen, that was the way she kept herself going. She’s got a temperament, but I love her, and I understand the way she is. Don’t get me started on being a woman in a situation like that.”22