by Mark Harris
Peck denied that pressure from black entertainers had anything to do with his decision, but he got the message. On Saturday morning, he hastily convened a meeting of the Academy Board of Governors. That afternoon, he announced that for the first time in the history of the Oscars, the ceremony would be postponed and would now take place two nights later, on Wednesday, April 10. The delay, and the cancellation of the Governor’s Ball, said Peck, “reflects the deep respect of all Americans for Dr. King and the Academy’s sorrow over his tragic death.”16 Margaret Herrick, the Academy’s executive director, immediately sent telegrams to all of the nominees and presenters asking them to confirm their availability for that evening.17 All four black performers said they would gladly participate. “There was never a doubt, after they made this very fine gesture, that we would be on the program,” said Davis, adding that everyone “from the most extreme militants to the most moderate were thrilled that the picture industry finally did something for the black man as a whole.”18
“Two days?” says Nichols, shaking his head. “That was all? That was what we thought was taking a big stand? But until then they really were going to go right ahead with it as planned.”19
Over the weekend, prominent Americans started to converge on Atlanta, where a service for King was to be held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, followed by a four-mile march to the campus of Morehouse College, where over one hundred thousand assembled mourners would hear a eulogy. At the beginning of the week, there was no longer much talk of “getting back to normal”; the Johnson administration struggled nervously with the question of how to treat the death of an unelected leader whose assassination seemed to have torn open a national wound. Johnson sent Vice President Hubert Humphrey to represent him. Jacqueline Kennedy was in attendance; so was Richard Nixon. Television networks preempted their schedules of game shows and soap operas to carry three hours of funeral coverage; Major League Baseball canceled its opening day. Ossie Davis came to speak, as he had done at the funeral of Malcolm X three years earlier; Mahalia Jackson sat in a pew in the church and wept, listening to the singing; Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Rafer Johnson could all be seen in the march. Norman Jewison, Haskell Wexler, and Hal Ashby flew to Atlanta; so did Marlon Brando, who had co-hosted SNCC fund-raisers with Arthur Penn in Hollywood.20
When Sidney Poitier arrived in the city, Harry Belafonte was already there; he had flown Coretta Scott King from Memphis to Atlanta on his own chartered plane. Belafonte, more than any performer of the time, was as much activist as entertainer; he and his wife, Julie, were close to the Kings, and he was perhaps the critical liaison between the civil rights movement and the Hollywood community. For years, he and Poitier, who were just nine days apart in age, had been brothers and rivals, competitors who were bound together by the uniqueness of their status in the entertainment industry but sometimes pulled apart by the same struggles that divided so many black Americans at the time: accommodation versus action, confrontation versus compromise, patience versus protest. There is little doubt that Belafonte had made Poitier into more of an activist than he otherwise would have been—and little doubt that Belafonte thought his friend could have done still more.
Poitier walked into a planning meeting of King’s inner circle at which Belafonte was advocating strongly for an additional commemorative event in Atlanta, possibly a rally in a stadium to be held the night before the funeral. Poitier spoke up in opposition, feeling it would be impractical to plan a huge event on such short notice and that another large-scale gathering might draw attention away from King himself. It was the wrong moment for a conflict. Poitier, by far the more formidable cultural presence, had challenged Belafonte in the one arena where he was used to preeminence. Belafonte’s wife tore into Poitier in a way that made it clear that resentment had been simmering close to the surface for some time. Poitier won the point, but, at least temporarily, he had lost a friendship. “I just knew I had hurt him awfully,” he wrote later. “After that day in Atlanta, Harry didn’t speak to me.”21
The next day, Poitier flew to Los Angeles, where the Oscars were back on schedule and everybody was pressing ahead. Nobody canceled; nobody declined to appear. Hollywood had made its statement, and now it was going to have its celebration. “Oh, there were so many phone calls beforehand,” says Penn. “‘Are you going?’ ‘I’m not going.’ ‘Well, I’m not going!’ ‘Well, I’m not going, either!’ And in the end, everybody who called me and said ‘I’m not going’ went.” He laughs. “But I didn’t go. I went once, for The Miracle Worker. That was enough.”22
The only other major nonparticipant was far more surprising: Arthur Jacobs. The man who had worked so hard to make Doctor Dolittle, and then to secure a Best Picture nomination for it, had decided to stay away. One week earlier, Jacobs’s newest movie, Planet of the Apes, had opened; it was already shaping up to be a major success. But Jacobs, perhaps sensitive about the charges that Dolittle’s nominations were all but bought by 20th Century-Fox, chose to avoid the spotlight. “He never wanted to go,” says Natalie Trundy. “That was the shy part of him. We went to a party at the home of Lew Wasserman’s then son-in-law and watched it on TV. After all that! Can you imagine?”23
In the bleachers outside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that night, eight hundred movie fans gaped at the red carpet arrivals. Army Archerd asked them to vote for their choices in the top categories by cheering: They picked Bonnie and Clyde for Best Picture, Cool Hand Luke’s Paul Newman for Best Actor, and Anne Bancroft for Best Actress.24
When Faye Dunaway walked in on the arm of her boyfriend, the photographer and soon-to-be director Jerry Schatzberg, a teenager in a T-shirt yelled, “Hey, Bonnie, where’s Clyde?” She smiled and waved.
Inside, the mood was more sober. “The world has always looked to Hollywood for escape,” Hal Kanter told the audience in a warm-up speech before the telecast began. “In our ceremonies tonight, we hope to provide a measure of relief to a nation which today has again begun the normal routine.”25 The tone was to be tranquilizing; the theme of the show was the fortieth anniversary of the awards, and the evening was meant to reflect Hollywood’s sense of its own history, elegance, and importance. Whether by design or chance, the seating arrangement reflected the year’s thematic division: The nominees for Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night were seated along one aisle; on the other were Cecil Kellaway, Audrey Hepburn, Carol Channing, Edith Evans, and George Kennedy.26 Other than the stars who lined the aisles, the audience in the auditorium appeared to be, literally, old Hollywood: Peering anxiously from their seats as the camera panned their faces very briefly, the vast majority of attendees looked elderly, weary, and sour—a group of unenthusiastic Rotarians and their wives stuffed into formal wear for an evening of forced jollity.
Eastman Kodak, the telecast’s sole sponsor, had made sure to prepare an array of commercials showcasing America’s racial harmony, so after a long advertisement for X-ray film that featured a black radiological technician, the curtain rose on an incongruously ornate set meant to replicate a Louis XIV drawing room. Gregory Peck walked to the microphone. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “This has been a fateful week in the history of our nation. We join with fellow members of our profession and men of goodwill everywhere in paying our profound respects to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Society has always been reflected in its art, and one measure of Dr. King’s influence on the society we live in is that of the five films nominated for Best Picture of the Year, two dealt with the subject of understanding between the races.”
It was a good start. The room was quiet and tense, but there was a sense that Peck had navigated a difficult path between the cheery artificiality of the evening and the bleakness of the day’s headlines with modesty and taste. Those qualities vanished the moment he introduced the evening’s master of ceremonies, Bob Hope, “that amiable national monument who pricks the balloons of pomposity.” Hope ambled out and
made it immediately clear that he thought the two-day delay was much ado about nothing. “It didn’t affect me, but it’s been tough on the nominees,” he said. “How would you like to spend two days in a crouch?” As Hope went on, talking about how “any delay really snarls up programming” and joking that Eastman Kodak’s image would be hurt by “a show that took three days to develop,” there was some uneasy laughter. Mike Nichols squirmed in his seat. “What I remember is that it felt like he was saying something to the effect of, ‘Well, here we are after an absolutely needless postponement,’” he says. “And in that moment, he sort of became the enemy.”27
As Hope continued, trotting through jokes about Bing Crosby and Zsa Zsa Gabor, it became clear that beneath the surface of his comedy was barely concealed reactionary anger. “A year ago we introduced movies with dirty words,” he said. “This year we brought you the pictures to go with it.” The telecast’s director avoided audience reaction shots for the most part but caught Hoffman barely smiling (“I can’t imagine nominating a kid like Dustin Hoffman,” Hope said of the thirty-year-old. “He starred in a picture he can’t get in to see”). The camera also spotted Beatty and Dunaway looking awkwardly ahead when Hope started in on their movie (“I don’t know what the writers have been smoking this year…Bonnie and Clyde is about happy killers…”).
The first award of the night, for Best Sound, went to In the Heat of the Night. Norman Jewison, who had gone into the ceremony not daring to hope for much, began to sense the evening might go well for him. When Patty Duke came out to read the Best Supporting Actor nominees, the camera captured Bonnie and Clyde’s Michael J. Pollard in a ruffled collar and Gene Hackman looking apprehensive; the winner was Cool Hand Luke’s George Kennedy, who got up and made a brief, abashed speech in which he thanked the Academy for “the greatest moment of my life.” “I was favored to win in Las Vegas,” recalls Pollard. “George Kennedy wasn’t even going to come because he thought I was going to win…. Warren said, as soon as [I] didn’t win, he knew it was going to go downhill from there.”28
“George Kennedy!” says Arthur Penn. “Jesus!”29
As the night went on and the leaden Camelot started to rack up victories, Buck Henry, who was nominated for The Graduate and remembers feeling “a boredom and irritation so deep that the next time I was nominated I went straight to New York and stayed there,” kept exchanging glances with Robert Benton and David Newman across the aisle. “We were old friends,” he says. “We had worked together, and as the awards were given out and some old-guard person won over infinitely better work, we gave each other a look that said, ‘We’ve had it—we’re out of this race.’”30
The evening was dying on its feet. Hope’s material alternated between the overfamiliar and the inadvertently tasteless (he remarked that an usher was on his way to check “the lump in Warren Beatty’s pocket” and introduced presenter Natalie Wood as “the most talented beauty who ever came out of the Woods”). The winners seemed almost embarrassed, confining their speeches to a sentence or two. The Best Cinematography Award went to Burnett Guffey, who had shot, then quit, and then returned to Bonnie and Clyde. It was the movie’s first award of the night. “Thanks, everyone who helped me do it,” said Guffey. “That’s really all I can say.” He walked off. The speech by L. B. Abbott, who won the Visual Effects Oscar for Doctor Dolittle, was even shorter. When Alfred Hitchcock, who had never won an Oscar, was presented with the Irving Thalberg Award by Robert Wise, he trundled to the microphone, said, “Thank you,” and began to walk away. The gesture was so perfectly in keeping with the perfunctory tone of the night that the audience could no longer contain its laughter. Hitchcock seemed startled; he walked back to the podium as if he had suddenly remembered something important and added, “Very much indeed.” The two Hollywoods seemed to be fighting each other to a draw; when Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross were brought out to present an award with Bob Hope, they looked as if they were trapped at a family dinner with an uncle they didn’t like. “Hi, kids,” said Hope, barely bothering to conceal his lack of interest. At one point, Martha Raye came out to read a telegram from General William Westmoreland, thanking the entertainment community for its USO shows. There was a smattering of polite applause. A film clip of Gone With the Wind ended with the Confederate flag flapping in the breeze. The audience greeted it with silence.
Many of the evening’s early winners were from England, Canada, and France; the Best Foreign Language Film winner was Czech director Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Menzel, enjoying the brief freedom of the Prague Spring, was there to accept. “Anne Bancroft sat right in front of me,” says Dustin Hoffman, “and Mel Brooks sat right next to her, and he was driving her crazy. Every time they would announce a foreign nominee or winner and he would come down the aisle, Mel would say out loud, ‘Wacko! Another wacko!’ Anne was literally sinking in her seat, saying, ‘Mel, please, jeez, stop!’”31
With very few reaction shots, and with the audience observing what was then a long-standing tradition of withholding its applause during the reading of the nominees, it would have been hard for television viewers to gauge the mood of the room as the first hour of the show unfolded, but the level of energy and anticipation rose somewhat when Walter Matthau came out to present the award for Best Supporting Actress. The camera cut from Thoroughly Modern Millie’s Carol Channing to Barefoot in the Park’s Mildred Natwick, then to Estelle Parsons, who was starring on Broadway in a struggling Tennessee Williams play, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, and had had no intention of going to the Oscars until her producer, David Merrick ordered her to take the night off and Warren Beatty sent her a plane ticket; Warner executive and future Academy president Sid Ganis was her escort for the evening.32 Viewers then saw Beah Richards, the lone black acting nominee, staring stoically ahead; she had been shaken to her soul by King’s assassination. “It was a terrible time,” Richards said later. “I was kind of unconscious during the whole thing. I wasn’t even ‘there,’ do you know what I mean?…I didn’t know what anything meant.”33 Matthau read the name of the last nominee, The Graduate’s Katharine Ross, and then announced that the winner was Parsons, news that was greeted with the first cheers of the evening. Parsons covered her face, giddy, and ran to the stage. “Boy, it’s heavy!” she said before going on to thank Penn, whom she called “my own particular genius” and “of course, Warren Beatty,” who beamed from the audience as his film took home its second Oscar of the night.
In the Heat of the Night won its second award when Hal Ashby took the prize for Best Film Editing. Ashby had trimmed his long hair and beard but had forgone the white-tie dress code in favor of an ivory turtleneck and love beads. (“Groovy. Really groovy,” Steve McQueen cabled him the next day.)34 Ashby’s brief plea that the industry “use all of our talents and creativity toward peace and love” was the closest thing to a political moment on the telecast since Peck’s opening remarks; in fact, no presenter or winner alluded to King again until Peck himself, who was brought out to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and remarked, “It’s a humbling experience to hear oneself described as a humanitarian at any time, but especially this week.” He went on to make a brief plea that viewers show their support for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “with its nonviolent approach to our most pressing problems,” by sending contributions to the Martin Luther King Jr. Fund. Peck exited to warm applause, and as the show moved into its next segment—a film clip of Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier facing off at the Sparta train station—a sense developed that the evening was beginning to take a particular direction.
Leslie Bricusse was in England working on the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips for Arthur Jacobs, so he missed Sammy Davis Jr.’s finger-snapping, hip-shaking rendition of “Talk to the Animals,” which ended with Davis, in a nod to the new series Laugh-In, saying, “Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, bay-bee! Here come de judge, here come de judge…” (“Here come de judge,” replied a somewhat bewildered Ho
pe, hoping to ride the laugh.) Bricusse didn’t realize that he had won the Best Song Oscar for the song that Rex Harrison couldn’t stand until weeks later, when Davis, who accepted for him, handed him the statuette. When the composer received all the congratulatory calls and telegrams, he assumed he must have won for Best Original Score—an award he lost to Thoroughly Modern Millie’s Elmer Bernstein.35
A tin-eared, all-brass version of “The Sound of Silence” played as Leslie Caron came out to present the Best Director Oscar, which went to Mike Nichols—the only award The Graduate was to win that night. Norman Jewison held his breath as the winner was announced, then slumped back in his seat, feeling “terrible disappointment”36 as Nichols took the stage to sustained applause. In his genial and low-key speech, Nichols said he shared the award with the people who worked on the film, smiled, and wished his mother a happy birthday. Inside, he says, “I was completely blank. I stopped thinking, I stopped feeling. I was Mister Anhedonia—I just had no pleasure in it. Back then, I was a) very spoiled, b) very neurotic, and c) I had a very impaired sense of reality. To me, the Academy Award meant that you ended up at the Beverly Hills Hotel at midnight feeling empty. I don’t know where I was, but that night, I just wasn’t there.”37
