Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Poitier knew that Hepburn and Tracy were on unfamiliar terrain just trying to get through a dinner with a black man who wasn’t serving them. Although he permitted himself some private irritation—“If it had been Paul Newman they were going to do a movie with, would they have checked him out so thoroughly?” he wondered—he made as many allowances as he could for two stars who struck him as “exceedingly decent people.”4 Still, one can only imagine his polite smile as he listened to Hepburn feel her way toward some sort of position on contemporary race relations, a subject on which her tone-deafness could be stunning. “I made a picture in Africa,” she told an interviewer at the time, “and I know that there is one characteristic the Negroes have which is wonderful and basic: the desire and ability to make people feel wonderfully about themselves…. I think that when the bulk of them get out of the rut they’ve been kept in, they’re going to snag all the public relations jobs because they’re brilliant about remembering people. When you drive into New York…there’s a colored policeman at the [bridge] who says, ‘Miss Hepburn, you’re back. How nice.’…This quality is straight out of the jungle; they had it in the jungle when I made The African Queen.”5

  After the dinner was over and the guests moved to the living room, Tracy told some well-rehearsed anecdotes about his old movies, and Hepburn, according to Poitier, would “listen to each with wide-eyed fascination, as if she were hearing it for the first time.” When she would interrupt, Tracy would cut her off with, “Oh, Katie, just shut up and let me tell the story.”6 By the end of the dinner, Poitier knew that he had passed whatever test he had just been asked to undergo.

  Hepburn decided she officially approved of Poitier, albeit on her own cringe-inducing terms. What the actress intended as a gush of praise for her new colleague—“I can’t consider Sidney as a Negro; he’s not black, he’s not white, he’s nothing at all as far as color is concerned”7—represented exactly the attitude that was bringing Poitier under increasingly direct fire from social critics and movie reviewers alike. Much of the anger was coming from black progressives, who were starting to use Poitier’s weakness for playing cardboard heroes as a means to attack Hollywood’s unwillingness to create stronger black characters. In an essay titled “And You Too, Sidney Poitier!” in his 1966 manifesto, White Papers for White Americans, Calvin Hernton complained, “Why can’t Sidney Poitier…make love in the movies?…By desexing the Negro, America is denying him his manhood.” Hernton went on to accuse Hollywood of a “systematic attempt to castrate” Poitier or, worse, to make him play “faggots.”8 At the same time, there was no shortage of white commentators who were eager to use Poitier as a vehicle to peddle their own noxious stereotypes. “Where is the Negro American life depicted in movies as it’s lived by American Negroes? Where’s the child desertion and illegitimacy, the policy games and the bag women?” wrote Burt Prelutsky in the Los Angeles Times. “Do you think for a moment that you will ever go to a movie and see Sidney Poitier father an illegitimate child, live off his woman’s earnings or mug an old Jew on the subway?” Concluding that “the pendulum” had swung too far, he labeled Poitier a “Negro in white face.”9

  Poitier, always conscious of playing to the center of the American moviegoing audience, knew that the center was starting to move, and he was trying to move along with it. He used his growing influence to urge Stanley Kramer and William Rose to toughen his character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and they added a scene in which Prentice privately confronts his own father about his resistance to the marriage, one of only two moments in the movie when the audience is permitted to overhear a snatch of conversation between two black characters without a white observer present. But Poitier was still hamstrung by three unsolvable problems: Kramer’s insistence that his character be so far above reproach that Tracy and Hepburn would not be able to, in her words, consider him as a Negro; the screenplay’s gimmicky contradiction of a man independent enough to propose an interracial marriage after a whirlwind courtship but so timid and traditional that he leaves the final decision to his fiancée’s father; and the fact that Kramer and Rose wanted the young woman herself to be a blank slate, a middle-aged man’s idealization of innocent yet contemporary mid-1960s girlhood.

  To that end, they cast the film’s final principal role with Katharine Houghton, an untried twenty-one-year-old actress who was the daughter of Hepburn’s sister Marion Hepburn Grant. Houghton was, in most ways besides genealogy, an unlikely choice; she had suffered from a severe bout of rheumatic fever as a teenager and went through her adolescence with what she calls “a very limited physical life…. I had been told initially that I would be in a wheelchair by the time I was twenty-one, or dead, so I was always feeling that I was living on borrowed time.” Houghton began acting in student films while at Sarah Lawrence College, realizing that in the short takes required by movies, nobody would be able to see her pronounced limp or “put it together that I was an invalid.”10 Kramer always maintained that Houghton was initially suggested to him by Carl Reiner, who was making Enter Laughing at Columbia while Kramer was casting and had auditioned her for the comedy, but it’s clear that Hepburn’s enthusiasm about her niece played a decisive role. Hepburn had, after all, gotten Tracy to do the film, and Kramer knew how much he owed her, although the debt, of course, was never expressly called in. Throughout the making and release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, everyone involved stuck to the same story—Kramer was charmed by the young actress, dumbstruck by her resemblance to Hepburn, and he chose her completely on his own. Clearly, his hand wasn’t forced: As a producer, he knew exactly the human-interest magazine stories Houghton’s presence would generate. “‘This is a family,’” Kramer’s wife, Karen, told him, “‘Why not take the niece? There’s a great publicity factor here, with “Aunt Kate” and Katharine Houghton. Why don’t you do it?’ I was newly married, and we’re sometimes most effective at that moment. So he took her.”11 But there is no doubt about Hepburn’s advocacy and involvement: Behind the scenes, she oversaw and approved every detail of Houghton’s contract, which came to a grand total of $6,000 and included an option for four more films for Columbia at preset, modest salaries.12

  Kramer had looked at other young actresses for the role of Poitier’s fiancée; he was interested in Mariette Hartley but didn’t think she was a good physical match for Hepburn, and he approached Samantha Eggar, whose high cheekbones and auburn hair would have made her a more than credible choice as Hepburn’s daughter.13 But even though production on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was not scheduled to begin until March, Eggar saw no end in sight to Doctor Dolittle. She also would have been fifty times as expensive as Houghton, and with Tracy’s health appearing to worsen by the month, Columbia was not about to do anything to increase its financial risk. “There was nothing hypothetical about it,” says Houghton. “Because Kate was my aunt, I knew, of course, that Spencer really was dying and that it was becoming a dire crisis.”

  Just how dire became clear only a few weeks after Tracy and Hepburn’s dinner with Poitier. In February, as the last sets at Columbia were being built and some of the supporting actors were coming onto the lot to sign their contracts, Tracy collapsed at his home, so sick from a buildup of fluid in his lungs that paramedics had to come and give him oxygen. He recovered after a few days but told Kramer he didn’t think he was up to doing the movie. The director was in San Francisco, already beginning to shoot the scene that opens the film, in which Poitier’s and Houghton’s characters arrive at the airport from a vacation in Hawaii. “I called Kate, and she said the film had been canceled,” says Houghton. “I thought, well, I had one day—that was fun.”14 Production was postponed for a few weeks. It was then that Kramer agreed to put his half-million-dollar salary in escrow and also told Tracy that he wouldn’t make the movie without him. Columbia, looking at a reduced budget (including $71,000 in insurance for Tracy that was now canceled), stayed on board.15 Tracy rallied and a few days later felt well enough to step back into the project
and announce that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would be his seventy-eighth and, he said, final film.16

  Eggar wasn’t wrong about Doctor Dolittle; what had originally been planned as a brief reunion of the cast for the final shoot in Los Angeles stretched into four more months of production. The delays caused by both the natural and man-made disasters of the location shoots in Castle Combe and St. Lucia had forced the re-creation of lengthy segments of the movie on the 20th Century-Fox lot, and although Richard Fleischer insisted in interviews that the film’s budget was holding steady at $15 million,17 $18 million was closer to the truth. With panic about Dolittle’s expenditure and schedule now almost pointless, Jacobs and the studio started killing the messengers; shortly after film editor Marjorie Fowler warned the producer that any guess about a timetable for editing Dolittle “quite possibly carries the same validity as a tea-leaf reading,” she was fired.18

  Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts, set up in a mansion in Beverly Hills, were both drinking more heavily than ever in what Roberts later called a period of “real disintegration.”19 “They had rented a house that my godfather, Jean Negulesco, used to own,” recalls Natalie Trundy, who was by then Arthur Jacobs’s fiancée. “There was one night when Rachel Roberts was so drunk that the police picked her up—she had run away, and they found her crawling through the grass, trying to get home. And Rex used to come to the set in the morning with about five martinis in him. It was pathetic.”20 The couple’s problems were becoming dangerously public: They showed up disheveled and disoriented at a tribute to George Cukor one night, Harrison with his toupee stuffed in his jacket pocket; on another occasion, Harrison appalled a room full of the Hollywood establishment—among them William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart, and their wives—at a party at the Los Angeles restaurant the Bistro, singing obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.21

  By the end of the shoot, several of the cast members were barely on speaking terms with their star. For Geoffrey Holder, the last straw came in February, when the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie came to Los Angeles to visit the set of Dolittle during a week-long trip to the United States. The day he visited the set, Fleischer was filming one of the many sequences set in Africa that had originally been planned for St. Lucia. “Selassie was very quiet,” says Holder, “and his coolness and composure made Rex look short. And Rex couldn’t stand it when he wasn’t the center of attention—you can’t even say that it was My Fair Lady that went to his head, because it was all there already. So we meet Haile Selassie, and do you know what Rex had to say to him? ‘Uh…how do you like our jungle?’ Our jungle! What a bitch he was.”22

  Nevertheless, Harrison, as the key selling point of Doctor Dolittle, still wielded extraordinary power on the production. Long after Anthony Newley had filmed one of his songs, Harrison insisted that it be taken away from the character of Matthew and be reshot with Dolittle singing instead, and Jacobs assented.23 At the same time, Dick Zanuck was still concerned that the film wasn’t big, spectacular, or special enough; at great expense, he commissioned two new songs and rehired Bricusse, who thought he had seen the last of Harrison and animals months earlier, to write them.24 When the movie finally finished production, Harrison had one last bombshell for Jacobs: Having insisted on performing all of his songs live during the movie’s production, he now announced that he wanted to rerecord them. Lionel Newman, the head of Fox’s music department, was furious, calling Harrison’s latest whim “a crock of shit,” but he got his way, and even Newman had to admit the results were an improvement.25

  Doctor Dolittle finally wrapped in April, with little fanfare or ceremony for its exhausted crew. Zanuck and Jacobs both knew that their main job on the movie until it opened in December would be salesmanship, regardless of whether the product was worth selling. In Variety, a huge ad announced that reserved-seat tickets for the first nineteen weeks of the movie’s premiere run at New York City’s Loews State Theatre, which was to begin on December 21, 1967, were available at sky-high prices ranging from $2.50 to $4.00,26 and Richard Fleischer began shrewdly positioning the movie for an Academy Awards campaign by giving an interview in which he called for the abolition of the annual prizes given by the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and various craft unions on the grounds that they diminished the impact of the Oscars.27

  Dolittle’s astonishing final cost28—$29 million after the then astronomical $11 million marketing budget was factored in*—should have been enough to make the blood of any studio executive run cold. But in the spring of 1967, blind belief in the future of the movie musical reached an apex of irrational exuberance. Universal Pictures had just opened Thoroughly Modern Millie, a long, silly 1920s pastiche put together by producer Ross Hunter for $7 million when he couldn’t get the rights to the stage musical he really wanted to adapt, The Boy Friend.29 Hunter had paid top dollar to secure Julie Andrews, whose success in both The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins had made her the biggest box office star in the country at the end of 1966, according to a survey of theater owners. When director George Roy Hill insisted on cutting what he called “20 minutes of meaningless cream puff”30 from the movie, Hunter fired him and restored the footage, bringing Millie back up to a bloated but road-show-friendly 153 minutes, complete with an overture and an intermission. The movie may have been dreary, but it was also critic-proof; Millie eventually grossed $40 million worldwide, making it the studio’s biggest hit in five years. If Universal, a company that in the late 1960s was widely and justly regarded as inept at both the making and the selling of movies, could find its feet with a musical, the possibilities for other studios seemed limitless. As Millie took off at the box office, Dick Zanuck reunited Andrews with her Sound of Music director, Robert Wise, and put the three-hour musical Star! into production for release in 1968. Warner Brothers, awaiting the fall release of its own musical behemoth, Camelot, decided to repurpose that film’s magical-forest set and hired Francis Coppola to shoot Finian’s Rainbow on it.† And Buena Vista decided to take its Fred MacMurray comedy The Happiest Millionaire and expand it into a massive 164-minute reserved-ticket musical, the company’s first attempt ever to make a road-show movie that could play huge theaters like Radio City Music Hall at higher ticket prices.

  A heart attack, a budget that had tripled, and a production that had lasted ten months had not deterred Arthur Jacobs from investing his energy in another movie musical or from working with Rex Harrison again. Jacobs sold MGM on a musical version of its 1939 drama Goodbye, Mr. Chips and flew to Portofino, where Harrison and Roberts had fled as soon as Dolittle wrapped, to try to convince him to take the role that had won an Oscar for Robert Donat. When Harrison passed, Jacobs moved on to Peter O’Toole without missing a beat; he then returned to the Fox lot, where he had a new movie going into production. Science fiction was a genre that had almost no box office traction in the 1960s; audiences enjoyed the more outlandish technological excesses of the James Bond movies, but “flying saucer” adventures were part of a B-picture genre that was more than a decade out of style. What Stanley Kubrick was planning with MGM’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was still a mystery: Studio head Robert O’Brien had said only that “it won’t be a Buck Rogers type of space epic,”31 and Kubrick, who had been working on the film since 1964 and had kept it in postproduction for a year while he worked on the special effects, wasn’t talking. Most studios avoided sci-fi altogether, but Dick Zanuck had had some success with Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage and was willing to green-light another space travel film as long as Jacobs agreed to stick to a tight $5 million budget. A month after Doctor Dolittle wrapped, cameras started to roll on Planet of the Apes.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The first, put-together version [of a movie] is like a suicide note,” Arthur Penn has said, only half-jokingly. “It has no rhythm, it’s flaccid, excessive—there are no ‘emerging qualities.’” In the spring of 1967, Penn was, at least
, able to experience the mild despair he was feeling on his own terms; Bonnie and Clyde was being cut in Manhattan, away from the prying eyes of the studio, and he and Beatty were working at their own, deliberate pace while Dede Allen was giving them both a master class in what can be accomplished—and rectified—in postproduction. The skills of a great film editor are almost always invisible, and when Allen’s work on Bonnie and Clyde is discussed, the focus tends to be on her split-second cross-cutting in the shoot-out that ends the movie or the breakneck robbery getaway scenes. But Allen’s contribution was far more nuanced than the creation of a couple of showpiece sequences. Allen, who has called herself a “gut editor—intellect and taste count, but I cut with my feelings”—was almost peerless in her ability to focus on “character, character, character”:1 She had visited the set for a few days to get a sense of what Penn and his cast were trying to accomplish and returned to her Moviola with a sense of what to bring forth in each actor. Allen knew just how long she could hold a shot of Beatty to reveal the insecurity beneath Clyde’s preening; she seemed to grasp instinctively that sudden cuts to Dunaway in motion would underscore the jagged, jumpy spirit of Bonnie Parker and that slow shots of Michael J. Pollard’s C. W. Moss would mimic his two-steps-behind mental processes. And Allen cut Bonnie and Clyde with an eye and ear for the accelerating pace of the story, making the building of its panicky momentum her priority.