Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Nichols—the immigrant, the observer, the displaced boy who once said that one of the first two sentences he learned in English was “Please do not kiss me”32—finally understood why it had taken him years to settle on an actor to play Benjamin. “Without any knowledge of what I was doing,” he says, “I had found myself in this story.” And in Hoffman, he had found an on-screen alter ego—someone he could admonish for his failings, challenge to dig deeper, punish for his weaknesses, praise to bolster his confidence, and exhort to prove every day that he was the right man for the role. By the time the actor got into Benjamin’s Alfa Romeo to shoot the montage in which he drives across the Golden Gate Bridge to find Elaine,* “I don’t think they really cared whether I lived or died,” Hoffman says, laughing. “There was a helicopter and a remote, and the direction I got was, ‘Pass every car.’ Traffic was moving fast, and I would hear on the walkie-talkie, ‘Just drive.’ I remember thinking, I can’t get hurt—this is only a movie!”

  Late in the shoot, Hoffman was ragged, wiped out, short-tempered. “It was rough going,” he says. “It was long and it got much longer. I don’t think I ever went out. I came home, and I’d study for the next day.” His misery was manifest when he walked onto the set.

  “What’s the matter?” said Nichols, taking him aside.

  “I’m tired,” said Hoffman.

  Nichols didn’t say anything for a moment, then replied in a quiet, explanatory tone. “Well,” he said, “this is the only chance you’re ever going to have to do this scene for the rest of your life. When you look back on it, do you really want to say, ‘I was tired’?”33

  Nichols might as well have been talking to himself. “There’s no question I was in the grip of some thing,” he says. “Part of me knew what I was doing in terms of the outsider and so forth, but another part of me, a part that I had no inkling of, must have known that I would never get material so suited to me again. I knew all about it. Without even knowing I knew.”34

  TWENTY-FIVE

  On June 10, 1967, Spencer Tracy woke up at 3:00 in the morning, got out of bed, walked to his kitchen to make a cup of tea, and collapsed, dead from a heart attack. The official story, swiftly constructed for the next day’s newspapers, was that Tracy’s body had been discovered by the housekeeper who worked for George Cukor, on whose property he had lived; she then called Tracy’s brother and a physician. Tracy’s wife, Louise, and their two children arrived next, followed by Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, and Tracy’s business manager.1 This fiction was in all likelihood the handiwork of Howard Strickling, the longtime guardian of Tracy’s reputation at MGM and a friend of Louise Tracy’s who escorted her to the funeral.2 Decades later, after the death of Tracy’s widow in 1983, Hepburn began to offer, with increasing frequency and detail, her own account of the last night of Tracy’s life. She had run a wire from a buzzer that was by his bedside to a speaker in the room where she was sleeping; she heard him fall, heard the teacup shatter, found him dead, and called Phyllis Wilbourn, her assistant and closest companion. Hepburn asked Wilbourn to take all of her things out of the house before Tracy’s family showed up; then she changed her mind and put them all back in. When Louise Tracy arrived, she and Hepburn quarreled briefly over what suit Tracy would be buried in. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,” Hepburn said she told her a few days later. “Well, yes,” said Tracy’s widow. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor.”3 Hepburn’s decision to wait until Louise Tracy’s death to tell her side of the story was an act of discretion, but one that contained an element of self-protection; by the time she began to talk about—and to embroider on—her own relationship with Tracy, Hepburn had outlived almost everyone who could have contradicted her.

  Six hundred people attended the funeral service for Tracy at Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart of St. Mary Roman Catholic Church. Stanley Kramer and his wife, Karen, had been in Las Vegas, celebrating the end of production of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but they flew back immediately after Hepburn called them.4 Kramer served as one of Tracy’s pallbearers, along with Cukor, Jimmy Stewart, Garson Kanin, John Ford, Frank Sinatra, producer William Self, and Abe Lastfogel, Tracy’s agent at William Morris. 5 Hepburn, in her car, followed Tracy’s hearse until it reached the church, then turned around and drove home. “Of course, the minute it was over, the inside group went back to her house and told her everything,” says Karen Kramer.6

  Hepburn’s decision not to go to the funeral was consistent with the way she had managed to give the public glimpses of her relationship with Tracy for many years while saying nothing about it: Her behavior represented an act of self-denial and dignified restraint that still managed to be conspicuous and public. She had made nine movies with him, including his last; while her attendance at the church alongside much of old Hollywood might have raised some eyebrows, she must have known that her absence would be highlighted in every story that covered the service. In many of those reports, she was upgraded from “a friend of many years” to “the actor’s longtime companion.” Even The New York Times, in its tribute to Tracy, noted that “in personal crises, she invariably appeared near him” and “maintained a vigil at his bedside” when he had been hospitalized.

  The death of the man whom the Times called “one of the last screen titans of a generation”7 was greeted with a flood of sentiment and sorrow that was unusual for the period; in 1967, critics and the entertainment press could be callous, even cruel, to anyone they felt had overstayed his welcome. Earlier in the year, when seventy-seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin released the catastrophically stiff and awkward A Countess from Hong Kong, his first film in more than a decade, reviews had been brutal, not only about the movie but about the man himself: Time magazine’s piece was titled “Time to Retire,”8 and in The New Yorker, Brendan Gill had sneered that he “shows us not a trace of his former genius.”9 Three days later, when Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight opened in New York, the Times’ Bosley Crowther compared the two movies and wrote, “Chaplin…should not have tried to make A Countess from Hong Kong or anything else at his age!…It would have been so apt and charitable if someone could have saved these two men from the embarrassment of their hopeless follies,” and called Welles’s movie “a disgusting indulgence.”10 Neither director ever completed another dramatic feature. But Tracy, perhaps because he had seemed to care so little for his image or appearance over the years, was one of the few older actors whose appeal was multigenerational; even younger moviegoers eager to dismiss anyone they thought was “phony” claimed him as their own. In the language of the Old Sentimentality–vs.–New Sentimentality paradigm that Robert Benton and David Newman had created in Esquire back in 1964, Tracy was like Humphrey Bogart—the rare figure who made the jump from Old to New by making it appear that “a man can both care and not give a damn.”11

  Tracy’s death immediately raised the profile of his final movie, which was not due to open for six more months: Magazines and newspapers that had sent reporters to the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner rushed their stories into print early. Life asked Stanley Kramer to write a first-person tribute to Tracy; Garson Kanin began warming up to write a book-length “intimate memoir” that would retail a wildly romanticized version of Hepburn and Tracy’s relationship by penning a tribute in The New York Times; Look published a photo portfolio; Esquire called its Hepburn profile “The Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies.” The enshrinement of Hepburn and Tracy as the first couple of the screen—“perfect representations of the American male and the American female,” as she herself put it, with little apparent irony—was ordained within a week of his death, as was the valedictory affection with which his last screen appearance would be greeted.

  Lost in all the tributes was a remarkably timed piece of news that went unmentioned in stories about the movie: On the day Tracy was buried, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, ruling that laws forbidding racial intermarriage in sixteen states were unconstitutional in that the
y violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case had taken almost a decade to reach the Court. It began in 1959 when Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were sentenced to a year in jail for marrying each other, a term that was suspended on the condition that they leave the state of Virginia. (In his initial decision, the trial judge remarked that God had made His will manifest by putting different races on different continents.) The Warren Court examined Virginia’s law, which forbade intermarriage only if one of the parties was white, and concluded that it was “invidious racial discrimination…designed to maintain White Supremacy”; the Court also ruled that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”12 When William Rose had written Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a year earlier, he had included a line in which Prentice’s father tries to talk his son out of the marriage by saying, “In sixteen or seventeen states you’d be breaking the law!” Kramer kept the line in the movie, but as of June 12, it was no longer true.

  The landmark Loving v. Virginia decision might have received more attention had it not arrived at a moment when history was unfolding with breathtaking speed. The same day, news broke that President Johnson would, the next morning, announce the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court; meanwhile, the networks’ evening newscasts were filled with the aftermath of the Six Days’ War, which ended on June 10 and had transfixed much of America. On The Graduate, crew members were late to location shoots because they pulled their cars over to the side of the freeway, listening to reports that Israel had decisively won what Life magazine called “the astounding war.” Time, which had headlined its June 9 cover ISRAEL: THE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE, came back a week later with a heroic portrait of Moshe Dayan and the headline HOW ISRAEL WON THE WAR. And at Warner Brothers, Israel’s victory had an extremely peculiar collateral effect: It helped save Bonnie and Clyde.

  In early June, Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn took their movie to New York to screen it for Warner’s head of advertising, Dick Lederer, and distribution chief Ben Kalmenson. Lederer loved it, just as he had loved the screenplay. But Kalmenson thought it was worthless. “Benny really hated it,” says Robert Solo, who was just about to leave his job as assistant to Jack Warner’s deputy Walter MacEwen. “He’d say, ‘Warren doesn’t mean anything to audiences,’ and that was it. He was a crotchety, opinionated guy, a real old distribution hand, basically a jumped-up film salesman. He thought it was a cheap gangster movie, he wanted to bury it, and he did.”13 Lederer lobbied hard to get the movie booked into Manhattan’s Cinema I, one of four first-run theaters on Third Avenue between 59th and 60th streets, a stretch of real estate so important to review-driven movies well into the 1980s that it came to be known in the industry as “the Block.” He talked about the value of a red-carpet premiere on the East Coast. Kalmenson wouldn’t hear of it; he booked the movie into two far less prestigious theaters, one near Times Square, the other in Murray Hill. He thought so little of Bonnie and Clyde that when he handed out a schedule of Warner Brothers’ summer releases to his distribution team, the picture wasn’t even listed.14

  Beatty and Penn then took the print to Los Angeles to show it to Jack Warner, but by the time they got there, Kalmenson had delivered his verdict to Warner himself, confirming what his boss had feared when he read the script—the movie was nothing but a bloody retread of the 1930s gangster movies they used to make that were just one step up from Poverty Row. “Warner listened to Kalmenson,” says Solo. “He’s the man who was responsible for Jack Warner selling his stock in the studio to Seven Arts. He was really friendly with [Seven Arts head] Eliot Hyman, and Hyman kept wanting to buy the studio, and Kalmenson talked Warner into it. It was really against Warner’s better judgment, because after that, he was done. He had the money, but he didn’t have his studio.”15

  Jack Warner was already livid about the amount of time Penn, Beatty, and Dede Allen had taken editing the movie; he had threatened repeatedly to pull their funding during postproduction, to stop paying the rent on the New York editing rooms, to take the movie out of their hands.16 “It won’t be long before I should be leaving,” he fumed, wondering why he was spending his last weeks at the company he co-founded “waiting around for geniuses to make up their minds, which I am not going to do.”17 In the spring, he had told Walter MacEwen, Penn and Beatty’s biggest champion in the upper ranks, to crack down on the “thoughtless” director and producer: “If they are going to sit around we will end up with a slow, repetitious picture and anything Beatty is in will go on and on. This is the story on actors cutting pictures.”18 Even MacEwen was beginning to lose his patience; Beatty and Penn had insisted on editing the movie in New York against his wishes; they had delayed a small but critical reshoot until mid-May; and they were pushing past the limits of even a liberalized Production Code (“eliminate depiction of fellacio [sic],” an appalled MacEwen jotted down, trying several different spellings after watching footage of Dunaway sliding out of frame while in bed with Beatty). In addition, Beatty, whether out of insecurity or annoyance at the difficulties Dunaway had caused during the shoot, had dug in for months in resistance to her agent’s demand that she be billed above the title, a star-making flourish that the studio thought would help launch her. Beatty didn’t give in until the studio started exploring whether it had legal standing to take the movie away from him altogether. “Would prefer not yielding to threats,” he calmly cabled MacEwen before finally giving in. “In any case you are the boss.”19

  When Penn and Beatty walked onto the lot, they reentered a world that seemed frozen in time. “Studio life in 1967 was very much the life it had been for years and years and years,” says Sid Ganis, one of a new generation of executives who moved from New York to Los Angeles after Seven Arts’ takeover. “It was still the old guard, lots of old guys with great stories about their old successes. But they had all been there for twenty-five years. Jack Warner still had an office and still had his desk with the three steps up to where he sat. But it was the end of an era.”20

  Publicly, Warner was celebrating his approaching seventy-fifth birthday by announcing, “I feel 14!” watching dailies from the production of Francis Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow,21 and telling reporters, “I intend to go on doing what I am doing. If I quit now, where would I go? What would I do?”22 But the truth was that Warner had given away his power and had only the trappings left; just a few weeks after his confident pronouncements, he would resign as production chief.

  Warner was spending more and more of his time at home, and Penn and Beatty brought the print to his private screening room, with Walter MacEwen and a couple of publicists in tow. “If I have to get up and pee,” Warner told Penn, “I’ll know it’s a lousy movie.” “Well, he was up before the first reel,” says Penn. “And several times after that.”23 Penn sat there, his mood black, feeling that he had made “the most diuretic film in human memory.”24 “He didn’t like it, didn’t understand it, didn’t get it, and Benny Kalmenson had already seen it and proclaimed it a piece of shit, so that was that,” Penn says. Warner took in Bonnie and Clyde with the eyes, the ears, and the taste of an angry, cut-off man and hated everything about it. The vintage photographs at the beginning were too blurry; the sound was too low; the dialogue was too muffled. “What the hell was that?” he said. “That’s when Warren tried his wonderful line, ‘It’s an homage to old Warner Brothers gangster movies,’ and Jack sort of perked up and said, ‘What the fuck’s an homage?’” says Penn. “It was the beginning of a dark time, because it was clear that if he didn’t like it and Kalmenson didn’t like it, it was gonna get dumped.”25

  In the days that followed, Beatty tried a bluff, suggesting to Kalmenson that if the studio was so unhappy with the movie, he would gladly buy it back from them himself. Then the Six Days’ War broke out. By its end, Jack Warner was in full triumphalist mode. “Jack was very aroused,” Beatty told the Los Angel
es Times, “because Israel had done well and he’d raised more money for Israel than anyone in town.”26 At the end of the war, Warner was so exhilarated that he called the studio’s employees together on a soundstage so he could address them one more time as their leader. A few days earlier, he had announced that despite Seven Arts’ takeover, the company would continue to be named for him and his family. In a defiant mood, the pugnacious old man wasn’t about to sell off anything, even a movie he suspected was worthless.

  The same week, Columbia Pictures opened Sidney Poitier’s schoolteacher drama, To Sir, with Love. The studio’s expectations were minimal, especially since reviews were tepid, and critics who had praised Poitier for rising above his material in movies like Lilies of the Field and A Patch of Blue were now going after him for choosing these roles in the first place. “One hankers for the character he played in The Blackboard Jungle instead of the point-making prigs he takes on now,” complained Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker. “If the hero of this Pollyanna story were white, his pieties would have been whistled off the screen…. The fact that he is colored draws on resources of seriousness in audiences which the film does nothing to earn.”27 And Hollis Alpert, writing in Saturday Review, remarked that he was tired of seeing a “consistently desexualized” Poitier turn himself into “an ever more solid symbol, a minority figure who must eventually triumph…while making prejudice seem lowly and nasty.”28