Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  That gave Beatty all the ammunition he needed. It was clear that Seven Arts’ Eliot Hyman had little stake in promoting a movie he had inherited from the Jack Warner era, and he may have been uncommitted to Bonnie and Clyde in part because Beatty’s production company, Tatira, had been promised such a big share of the movie’s profits (should there be any) that the upside for the studio was limited. Whatever the reason, Beatty wasn’t having it—he confronted Hyman behind closed doors in an angry conversation during which he says he threatened to sue the new studio head. “I got tougher than I had been before,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to put this movie back in theaters,’ but beyond that, I felt I had a hand to play with Hyman, and I played it well.” The cards Beatty was holding were apparently less important than the cards Hyman feared he was holding; Beatty never made it clear exactly what he was going to sue him for—it’s likely that it had something to do with a potential financial conflict of interest regarding Reflections in a Golden Eye—but the brinkmanship worked. Hyman dispatched his new second in command, Joseph Sugar, to New York to meet with Dick Lederer. “Is this movie as great as you say it is?” Sugar asked.

  “Yes,” said Lederer, “and we almost destroyed it.” Together, they began mapping out plans for a rerelease.14

  At The New York Times, Bosley Crowther was still throwing as many punches at the movie as he could: When Cool Hand Luke opened, he called it “much more effective, for my taste, than the glossy pseudo-realism of Bonnie and Clyde.”15 But his battle was lost. In November, the paper’s executive editor Turner Catledge called him into his office and told him, as gently as possible, that it was time for a new assignment. Crowther would remain the chief movie critic of the Times through the end of December, in order to allow him to compile his final “ten best” list and, one last time, to preside over the New York Film Critics Circle awards. After that, he would be asked to serve as a roving reporter filing stories from film festivals around the world, but his days as a reviewer would be over. Renata Adler, who had never worked as a film critic, was to replace him. “I was very fond of Bosley Crowther, but it had to be done,” says Arthur Gelb, then the paper’s culture editor. “We had to have someone who could look at movies from a fresh perspective. At the Times, they never fire you—they feel too guilty. They just put you on a different path and give you more money to soothe their guilt. But I know he felt humiliated.”16 After thirty-nine years on the paper’s culture desk, Crowther had no choice but to accept the reassignment. His farewell piece was to be a column on The Graduate.

  As Columbia Pictures planned its publicity campaign for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Sidney Poitier was largely unavailable, immersed in the filming of For Love of Ivy. That was just as well for the cautious studio, which decided to capitalize on the sentiment surrounding Spencer Tracy’s death by centering its promotional efforts on Katharine Hepburn, who agreed to “introduce” her niece to the press in a series of carefully managed interviews. Then the movie got an unexpected boost from some front-page news. In September 1967, eighteen-year-old Margaret Rusk married twenty-two-year-old Guy Smith at Stanford University. Rusk was white; Smith was black; and Rusk’s father was the secretary of state. When Dean Rusk learned of his daughter’s engagement, he went to President Johnson and offered to resign rather than embarrass the administration, but he also made it clear that he intended to walk her down the aisle either way. Johnson didn’t let him go; his presidency was so intertwined with Rusk’s policy making that The New York Review of Books ran a front-page David Levine caricature of Rusk and the president depicting them as, respectively, Bonnie and Clyde.17 The Rusk-Smith wedding was covered extensively by most newspapers and made the cover of Time, which could have been reading outtakes from the final speech William Rose had given Spencer Tracy when it proclaimed, “In a year when blackwhite animosity has reached a violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to the marriage of two minds, color should be no impediment.” But the article also noted that the State Department had received hundreds of angry calls and letters, that many members of Rusk’s family did not attend the wedding, and that Democrats were worried about possible political fallout for Johnson in the 1968 presidential election. The magazine quoted one woman as saying of Rusk, “It will serve the old goat right to have nigger grandbabies,”18 and followed up with a letter column in which two correspondents approved of the wedding and two did not—one of whom argued that “the mongrelizing of races…would be more properly ignored.”19

  The wedding, even more than the Loving v. Virginia decision, brought the subject of interracial marriage to the forefront of the national conversation about race, with articles and editorials that typically focused on such issues as where “mixed” couples could live and what biracial children would have to endure and offered vague and uneasy prognostications about what intermarriage would “lead to”. As late as 1965, a Gallup poll revealed that 72 percent of southern whites and 42 percent of northern whites remained opposed to intermarriage.20 And Columbia Pictures had little interest in stirring up controversy; the studio’s New York publicity office kept out of the press all stills in which Poitier was seen kissing Houghton, marking them with red X’s and the word HOLD.21

  Whatever else he thought critics might throw at him, Stanley Kramer was now certain that he wouldn’t be accused of irrelevance, since there was still nothing approaching a national consensus on the subject. He was wrong. Life magazine’s Richard Schickel was the first major critic to review Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which opened on December 11, and he tore it apart, insisting that “as usual, Kramer is earnestly preaching away on matters that have long ceased to be true issues…. Where to begin discussing the ineptitude with which the nightmare is realized on the screen?” Schickel directly attacked the very decisions on which Kramer had built the movie—especially the choice to make Poitier’s character “not just an ordinarily decent chap, but…a regular Albert Schweitzer,” the contradiction inherent in a man of Prentice’s passion and independence submitting to the will of his fiancée’s parents, and the creation of Houghton’s character as an “imbecile” oblivious to the effect her engagement would have on her family. Schickel exempted only Hepburn and Tracy from his contempt, writing that “for me, at least, their performances in this movie are beyond the bounds of criticism.”22

  “Life magazine was the gospel back then,” says Karen Kramer. “We thought that review was going to kill the picture.” Schickel’s turned out to be only the first of several terrible notices for the movie, but even critics who couldn’t stand Kramer’s direction or Rose’s stacked-deck storytelling were stopped in their tracks by Hepburn and Tracy. “Kramer is simply not a very good director,” wrote Andrew Sarris. “The lumbering machinery of his technique is always in full view.” But he was as swept up as everyone else by the couple’s final moments together on screen, especially by the shot in which the camera seemed to catch Hepburn’s tears during Tracy’s monologue, which he called “a moment of life and love passing into the darkness of death everlasting…anyone in the audience remaining dry-eyed through this evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty has my deepest sympathy.”23The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill wrote as if there were no distinction at all between the actors and their characters: “When he turns to her…it is, for us who are permitted to overhear him, an experience that transcends the theatrical.”24Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern complained that “the film might have been made a decade or two ago with its painted sunsets, sclerotic photography, glaucomic process shots and plastic flowers pummeled by floodlights” but called Tracy and Hepburn “glorious actors playing very good parts.”25

  Only the oldest and mildest critics on the beat thought Kramer was up to anything revolutionary or dangerous. Variety was relieved that it was “non-sensational,” “balanced,” and (remarkably) “free of preaching.”26 The New York Post’s Archer Winsten, who had been review
ing movies since the 1930s, called it a “trip into the realms of living, breathing, fiery contemporary controversy,” noting that “you can’t say it couldn’t happen here. The Dean Rusk family appears to have fronted for this very film.”27 Even Crowther, who endorsed the movie warmly, admitted that it “seems to be about something more serious and challenging than it actually is” and wondered what Poitier’s character could possibly see in Houghton’s.28

  But liberal writers united in savaging the compromises and stereotypes inherent in what the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin called its “safety-first approach.”29 The reviewer for The Nation announced that he walked out after twenty minutes.30 In the National Catholic Reporter, Father Andrew Greeley titled his piece “Black and White Minstrels” and, flinching at Tillie the housekeeper’s embarrassing punch lines (“Civil rights is one thing, but this here’s somethin’ else!”), he wrote, “Laugh? I thought I’d die.”31 And in Harper’s, Robert Kotlowitz predicted the movie would face resistance “in both the South and in the Northern ghettoes. In the South…it will surface those ancient sexual anxieties about mixing the races; in the ghettoes…it can only insult its audience. I would not want to watch Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in a Watts or Harlem movie house, where it may well be stoned by young Negroes.”32

  As it turned out, Kramer’s movie didn’t run into trouble in the North, the South, the ghettos, or anywhere else; it was an immediate blockbuster, the highest-grossing movie Kramer, Hepburn, Tracy, or Poitier had ever made, and the biggest success in the history of Columbia Pictures. Where its critics received the film as a timid and neutered issue picture, audiences saw it as a benign, often very funny, and finally touching portrait of discomposure, a glimpse at every strained smile, awkward pause, and gentle groping toward humanity that would unfold if Sidney Poitier walked unannounced into the home of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Watching two of the most self-assured stars in screen history not know how to behave in front of a black man—which was exactly how the two of them, particularly Hepburn, had chosen to play it—may not have ignited any revolutions, but it made for a genuinely crowd-pleasing comedy. As Arthur Knight predicted correctly in Saturday Review, “the very elements that prevent it from coming to grips with its potentially explosive material are probably also the ones that would commend it to a wide audience.”33

  Neither Columbia nor the critics anticipated the breadth of the film’s demographic appeal. Older moviegoers turned out in force to watch Hepburn and Tracy together one last time; younger audiences, among whom Poitier had built a big following with the release of To Sir, with Love, showed up to see him again; and for the first time, black moviegoers were recognized as a massive force at the box office. Two weeks before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner opened, Variety published the results of a survey that showed that African Americans were going to the movies in numbers far greater than the studios had realized; in first-run theaters in large cities, they represented 30 percent of the audience. The figure, said the trade paper, “will perhaps astonish many white showmen…[but] this must…buttress the case for a more open-minded use of Negro actors…. It has become much too ironic to [rewrite] the part for a white actor if Sidney Poitier is not available or not interested.”34

  In the South, Kramer’s movie was not, initially, a sure thing. The worry expressed in Variety’s review that “certain Dixie areas may not dig the film, sight unseen”35 was well-founded, at least until a crush of popular demand overcame the institutional resistance of theater chain owners. Beah Richards’s family had to travel to Jackson, Mississippi, to see the picture, since no movie house in their hometown of Vicksburg would show it.36 One New Orleans theater owner showed the film but snipped out the brief shot of Poitier and Houghton kissing, a moment shown only in a rearview mirror as a cabdriver looks at them, annoyed.37 And in several cities, the Ku Klux Klan planned rallies, protests, and even attacks on theaters showing the movie; a scheme to throw tear-gas canisters into one theater was canceled at the last minute only when Klansmen discovered that the movie house was showing To Sir, with Love, a movie that local Klan leader Donald Heath apparently found less objectionable.38 But eventually, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner played everywhere, the few lunatic-fringe protesters were swept aside, and in at least one regard, it did make history: Questions about the southern financial viability of a movie starring a black actor were never raised again.

  As the movie took off, critics were still shaking their heads at its love-conquers-all message, complaining that Kramer and Rose had dodged every real problem intermarrying couples might face by virtually deracinating Poitier. Citing the moment when Prentice tells his father, “You think of yourself as a colored man, I think of myself as a man,” The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “Surely more and more Negroes today reject this washing-out of color and insist on thinking of themselves as Negroes.”39 But what Esquire’s Wilfrid Sheed had called “the Gentleman’s Agreement ploy, or, whoever thought that nice young man was a Negro?”40 had worked. Anyone, no matter how racist they might be, could enjoy the movie and congratulate themselves on finding Sidney Poitier an acceptable member of the family.* Within a few weeks, even the title was part of the cultural lexicon. “Guess who’s coming to dinner with the Rex Harrisons on Christmas Day?” wrote Radie Harris in The Hollywood Reporter. “Their colored maid, Ruby, that’s who.”41

  Harrison and Rachel Roberts had had a rocky summer after the completion of Doctor Dolittle. They returned to Portofino, where they spent time with, and quickly exhausted the patience of, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. During one long evening at the Burtons’, Roberts sent their guests Tennessee Williams and director Joseph Losey running for the door when, in Burton’s words, “she insulted Rex sexually, morally, physically…lay on the floor in the bar and barked like a dog…started to masturbate her basset hound.” Even Burton, no stranger to alcohol and excess, was shocked. “Rex is fantastically tolerant of her drunken idiocies,” he wrote in his diary after another incident a few days later. “She wouldn’t last 48 hours with me and he’s had it for seven years.”42 Harrison and Roberts spent the next couple of months miserably unhappy, filming an ill-considered version of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear together. By the time Harrison was called back into service by 20th Century-Fox for his final round of duties on Doctor Dolittle, he and Roberts were on better behavior. He drew the line at going to Peru, but he showed up, smiling and waving, for premieres in Paris, Scandinavia, New York, and Los Angeles. The Bricusses and the Newleys made the rounds as well. The guest lists weren’t exactly a roll call of the New Hollywood—the Los Angeles roster included the Reagans, the Samuel Goldwyns, and Dean Martin43—and nobody at the studio was harboring any illusions about what kind of critical reception awaited the picture. But Dick Zanuck and his lieutenants told themselves that it wouldn’t matter—that if they just announced loudly and frequently enough how wonderful their “Christmas gift to the world” was, nobody would look too closely once they unwrapped the box. Reviewers, after all, had referred to Fox’s last big musical repeatedly as “The Sound of Mucus,” and it was now the highest-grossing film in history. Maybe it wouldn’t matter what they thought this time, either. “We’ve got $50 million tied up in…Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly!,” Darryl Zanuck told John Gregory Dunne just before leaving for the London premiere. “Quite frankly, if we hadn’t made such an enormous success with The Sound of Music, I’d be petrified.”44

  With Academy Awards season approaching, the trade papers were, in those days, especially leery about stepping on the prospects of any expensive studio picture, and Variety ran a hilariously timid review that carefully noted that “the overall entertainment value of Doctor Dolittle is rather hard to pinpoint” and asked, “Is it a ‘good’ motion picture? The answer varies according to what the individual expects for his money.” While murmuring a few words of complaint about “some slow periods and some insufficiently defined plot elements,” the paper swept aside its own objections and noted
that over $400,000 of advance tickets had been sold in New York City alone, so the actual quality of the film might not matter. This wasn’t irrelevant; if Fox could make Dolittle look like a hit for just a couple of weeks, releasing photographs of long lines and sellout crowds, road-show houses outside of New York might book it before word started to spread. “After a couple of years” in theaters, Variety predicted, Dolittle could even earn back its money.45

  Those were about the last kind words that Arthur Jacobs’s film received in the press. The reviews weren’t scathing, but their yawning tone and the impression they conveyed of dullness and overkill was almost worse. “Children, shmildren,” snapped Archer Winsten in the New York Post. “Let them go by themselves if they like it so much. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t bored itchy.”46 Critics had few kind words for any element of the picture, even Harrison: Bosley Crowther predicted that audiences would be “considerably surprised and put off by [his] characterization. It has the inevitable casual air and tone of voice of Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.”47 Faulting the “flaccid pop songs” and “special-effects monstrosities” (especially the giant pink sea snail about which Jacobs had worried so much), Time’s reviewer remarked, “Somehow—with the frequent…exception of Walt Disney—Hollywood has never learned what so many children’s book writers have known all along: size and a big budget are no substitutes for originality or charm.”48 The comparison was apt: The same week Doctor Dolittle opened brought the release of Disney’s The Jungle Book, the last animated feature in which Walt Disney himself had had a hand, and there was no doubt about which picture critics, or children, preferred. Dolittle couldn’t even skate past the Disney film on the issue of stereotyping: While some commentators on the left attacked The Jungle Book as an encoded story about the importance of keeping the races separated, with each in its own part of the “jungle,” Dolittle’s episode involving what Newsweek called “dopey African tribesmen”49 was not greeted any more warmly. By the time Dolittle opened, word was also out about the long-forgotten racism in Hugh Lofting’s then unrevised books: The chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights asked for them to be removed from a Harlem school library, calling them “not truthful as to race” and “disparaging about Negroes.”50