The first time Gazzara was starred in a successful movie was for Otto Preminger’s classic Anatomy of a Murder (1959), one of the great American films. Ben played an extremely ambiguous role with infinite resonance and repressed violence. Here were Broadway’s newest stars, Ben Gazzara and George C. Scott (only his second movie), opposite such Hollywood legends as James Stewart and Eve Arden, all on location in a small Midwestern city where the real story—which formed the basis of Robert Travers’ best seller—actually took place. The score is one of only two ever done by the immortal Duke Ellington (who appeared briefly), and remains extraordinarily fresh and modern nearly half a century later. The movie is like that, too, and Gazzara gives one of his best and most charismatic performances. Benny would tell me that he was especially impressed with Stewart, who “always wanted to rehearse!”
Ben Gazzara as an Army officer accused of murder, and James Stewart as his attorney, in Gazzara’s second film, Otto Preminger’s brilliant and probably best movie, Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the finest picture ever made about the U.S. judicial system.
However, Ben’s movie career did not have the best of luck. He ended up doing some clunkers for money, missing out on some other important gigs, and appearing in a couple of TV series—Arrest and Trial and Run for Your Life—that were popular but which he abhorred having to do. The truth is that Gazzara is an artist, and wasn’t happy at all with the profound compromises of television, or films for that matter. He kept going back to Broadway, where he has always been a sensation. Onstage, he and Colleen Dewhurst did a legendary production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and he was starred in a memorable version of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; did superbly O’Neill’s one-man Hughie (with a terrific curtain-raiser by newcomer David Scott Milton, coincidentally an old friend of mine); was enormously touching opposite Gena Rowlands in a reading of Love Letters, recalling their pairing in a picture by Gena’s husband, John Cassavetes.
One of the few to give Gazzara the kind of movie roles he deserved was Cassavetes, through whom Gazzara and I first met in 1977. Benny’s work with John—in Husbands (1970), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977)—consists, apart from his first two, as probably the most challenging and rewarding roles he has had in pictures. Each captures a different aspect of Ben’s complicated persona, and showcases his versatility as an actor. Two further sides appeared to great effect in two starring roles for movies I directed and co-wrote, Saint Jack (1979) and They All Laughed (1981). We shot both on islands—Singapore and Manhattan—and they were two of the most highly charged and life-altering experiences I’ve ever gone through. Gazzara had an incalculable effect on both works, which are also among my own personal favorites.
During the shooting of Cassavetes’ Opening Night in Los Angeles, I went downtown to play a bit as myself, and at the lunch break, got to know Ben Gazzara a little. His gregarious, outspoken, expansive nature immediately suggested to me what I had been trying to find in an actor to play the title role for my next picture. The script of Saint Jack, based on Paul Theroux’s novel, had been rewritten and restructured by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), who was also a friend. The lead character was Jack Flowers, an Italian-American living in Singapore, circa 1973—while the Vietnam War still raged nearby—an equally gregarious and expansive guy, the eternal host no matter who’s paying the tab. “Peter, sit over here, order whatever you want,” he said to me, “John’s paying!” Cassavetes would nod: “That’s right, John’s paying—as usual.” And Benny would explode in laughter. He used to do that to me, later, in Singapore: “Go on, order whatever you want—some more satay and wine!—Peter’s paying!” When I’d say, “That’s right, thanks, Benny,” he would merrily laugh it up. A quiet communication in a public place was generally impossible with Ben Gazzara. Especially if he’d had a drink or two to warm him up. There was little that Benny mightn’t say out loud publicly—the word “irrepressible” was coined for Gazzara in a crowd.
We spent three or four months together in Singapore, at the same hotel, writing and acting together for Saint Jack, Ben directing me for my scenes, as I did for his. He encouraged me to play the part of the main heavy, and was hugely involved in all the rewriting of the screenplay, which went on virtually for the entire sixty-day shoot. Indeed, so inexpensive was the production crew, that it was worth it for us to stop shooting for a few days to give ourselves time to finish mapping out the remaining third of the movie. While living there, we had come to realize —Benny and George Morfogen (that superb New York actor and dear old friend of mine, serving as co-producer on Jack) and I—that here we were doing a film about a pimp and his women and there were no fully developed female characters in the script. To remedy this, both Ben and I did a lot of what we would between us call “research,” among the brothels, the madams, pimps, hookers, as well as the more regular men and women of Asia. Since Singapore is a huge melting pot of the East, as New York City is of the West, Gazzara and I came to know Chinese from numerous provinces of the thirteen that make up the mother country, people from Malaysia, from Sri Lanka, from Thailand, as well as from India, Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Over the six months I was there and the four Benny was, we certainly got to know, albeit briefly, men and women from all these places, especially the women. And we put what we learned—as much as we could—into the picture.
Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes getting ready for a scene in Cassavetes’ complicated theater drama, Opening Night (1977), the last of three pictures Gazzara and Cassavetes did together. Ben and Gena would work with each other a number of times afterward, on screen and stage.
Therefore, it wasn’t entirely fiction, that certain remark Ben made one morning to his daughter, which turned into a running gag. Both of us had been up pretty late in our separate rooms with ladies of the evening whom we had requested from the Chinese madam, who also played a madam in our picture. Several of these women ended up being cast in roles, one or two of them substantial, and a number were able to save up enough to move back to their homes away from Singapore. Anyway, Gazzara and I had both been doing this so-called research and casting until early in the morning, and we both had a six-thirty a.m. call, so when we got to the location in the heart of Singapore’s Chinatown—by today all razed and rebuilt—we were zonked, fried, exhausted. But coffee or tea and gorging on food somehow kept us going. Gazzara’s eighteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth had joined the staff while we were shooting, and seeing her father a trifle pooped first thing in the morning, she asked why he was so tired. Gazzara said we had been working very late, pointing at me and shaking his head in exhaustion. Elizabeth wasn’t satisfied. What were we doing? she asked. Benny vigorously slapped his forehead loudly, bending over as he did, and exploded, “Thinking and writing, darling! Thinking and writing!” I didn’t laugh at that moment, but simply walked away. Later, alone, I imitated his line, “Thinking and writing!,” slapping my forehead, and Benny completely broke up, as did I. That became our private catchphrase for the rest of the picture, and after.
In retrospect, our occupational hazards on Saint Jack had a lot to do with ending my nine-year relationship with Cybill Shepherd (co-producer and co-writer on the film), and with Gazzara ending his longtime marriage to Janice Rule. The main positive result of all this was the film we made, of which both of us were equally proud, and which won for Benny and me, respectively, the Best Actor Award and the Critics Prize at the 1979 Venice Film Festival. The picture also reinvigorated Gazzara’s picture career, and garnered the best notices I’d had in six years. His price shot up from a low of $15,000 for our film to $250,000 for his next, then $500, 000 and a million for the next two. The picture he got cast in directly off Saint Jack was Bloodline (1979). Michael Eisner and Barry Diller (then heads of Paramount) had come to my house and watched a screening there of Saint Jack with the idea of acquiring it for distribution. They almost did, but encountered internal oppos
ition. However, the next morning Gazzara was offered a quarter of a million to co-star opposite Audrey Hepburn in Bloodline. This directly led to my writing They All Laughed for Gazzara and Hepburn, that film offering Audrey her last starring role in features.
Gazzara and Hepburn had a brief but intense affair during Bloodline, and when he returned from shooting, Ben was mad about Audrey and told me a lot about her life at that time and about their affair, and how lonely and fragile and saintlike she was. I took note of it all and used this for the character she eventually played opposite Gazzara in They All Laughed.
Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk in Cassavetes’ superbly acted, resonant Husbands (1970), about three pals’ reactions to the death of a fourth; one of Gazzara’s best performances. Falk and Cassavetes are brilliant as the other two.
The idea for the picture in the first place was to deal with many of the personal crises and romantic dilemmas Benny and I and our friends had experienced over the years, but to hide these behind the genre-coating of a bittersweet, slightly screwball comedy about a group of private detectives who get much too emotionally involved in their cases, a metaphor for what we do in our work. So all the parts were not only written for the actors who eventually played them, but a lot of their scenes and back-stories were based on those actors’ personalities and their real lives.
Certainly, Benny was playing a guy totally inspired by Gazzara’s actual manner, his ways of speaking, his typical phrases, like “Yeah, that’s right.” I noticed no matter how many times he might say, “Yeah, that’s right,” he never said it the same way twice, there always being a slightly different intonation. In both Saint Jack and They All Laughed, the line between the characters Benny played and himself was erased. He existed in those roles so that when the pictures were over, his characters could be imagined walking on forever. To me, that’s the best kind of movie acting and Gazzara gave me the gift of this sort of golden performance twice.
Ben Gazzara and Audrey Hepburn on location on Fifth Avenue, near Tiffany, for a scene in their second film together, They All Laughed (1981), which came about because of the romantic involvement they shared on their first, Bloodline (1979).
While Saint Jack had been a very close experience for the two of us, life got in our way on They All Laughed. While filming Inchon (1981), shot right after Bloodline, he had fallen in love with Elke Stuckmann, the German woman who would become his third wife. This situation obviously created some tension between Ben and Audrey, which doesn’t show in the picture but was nevertheless another obstacle for Gazzara (and Hepburn) at that time. The shooting of Laughed and the next period of his life were marked by depression and anxiety, both of which he eventually licked. Since then, he has acted in many foreign and domestic productions, never less than excellent in all, superb in some (like Marco Ferreri’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1983); was suddenly discovered at the end of the nineties by the younger generation of American director-writers, like the Coen brothers, Todd Solondz, David Mamet and Spike Lee; had a great personal triumph off-Broadway with a one-man show about Yogi Berra, into whose persona he managed to submerge himself completely; wrote and repeatedly rewrote his autobiography, soon to be published, called Only the Beginning.
Both of us were terribly saddened by the death of John Cassavetes in 1989. We never see each other or speak that John’s name doesn’t come up. As it did while we were shooting in Singapore. Gazzara loved him like a brother and the feeling was mutual. “An artist!” Benny would exclaim about Cassavetes. “John is a real artist! How many are there?!” And John would say, “Well, Ben’s an artist, you know,” as a way of explaining Gazzara. I treasure the memory of Ben and John at dinner, their ways of egging each other on—with Peter Falk joining in; and Ben’s love of John’s wild rebelliousness, indefatigability and genius, John’s delight in Ben’s large-scale talent, humor and ego.
Recently, there was an AFI tribute screening in New York of Saint Jack, and Gazzara and I went. Watching the picture, it was hard for us to believe we had made it nearly twenty-five years before. The memory of every shot was vivid to each of us, as well as what we had been doing around it. Since we both looked a good deal younger, too, it wasn’t always easy to watch. We were often moved. Afterward, the Q&A portion with the audience was rewarding, as several mentioned how much the movie wasn’t like most films, because what Benny and I had tried to do was exactly that. We kept saying to each other, Let’s leave out all conventional movie scenes, let’s avoid anything obligatory. Gazzara had been a splendid watchdog on this vow.
At the end of shooting, for example, his character and mine had a big climactic scene running four-and-a-half pages of conversation, during which the moral underpinning of the picture is stressed. Ben’s Jack has made a deal for fairly big bucks—enough to take him back to the United States—with the CIA-FBI guy I play, in order to get some incriminating sexual photos of an American senator briefly visiting Singapore. Jack takes the sensational shots, but in the concluding scene, when he brings them to my character, decides against turning them over, saying at some length why finally he cannot stoop so low and continue to live with himself. The night before we were to film this, Ben and I rehearsed it at the hotel. We read the dialogue through a couple of times and both of us felt uncomfortable with it.
Benny said, “Isn’t this one of those scenes we were trying to avoid? Hitting it on the nose?” I agreed that’s what it was. “What am I really saying here?” Ben went on. “Aren’t I just saying, ‘Look—fuck it! I’m not playing ball!’” And that’s just what the scene became; neither of us caring that we’d just lost a major, heavy-dialogue sequence. Instead, Ben calls out my character’s name: “Hey, Eddie!” I look up to see him across the street from me. Gesturing with both arms as if to say, “It’s finished,” he yells to me over the traffic: “Fuck it!” and walks away, throws those scandalous photos into the river and disappears into the Asian crowds. Gazzara’s sense of truth as an actor helped give us an honest, undidactic, unmelodramatic ending. That is what happens when a brilliant actor so inhabits a part, and makes it his own, that he can do no wrong. At his best, on both stage and screen, this is exactly what you always get from Ben Gazzara—a real human being whom he finds for us within himself.
Born Biagio Anthony Gazzara, August 28, 1930, New York, NY.
Selected starring features (with director):
1957: The Strange One (Jack Garfein)
1959: Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger)
1961: The Young Doctors (Phil Karlson)
1962: Reprieve (a.k.a. Convicts Four) (Millard Kaufman)
1965: A Rage to Live (Walter Grauman)
1969: The Bridge at Remagen (John Guillermin)
1970: Husbands (John Cassavetes)
1972: The Family Rico (Paul Wendkos)
1975: Capone (Steve Carver)
1976: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes)
1977: Opening Night (Cassavetes)
1979: Saint Jack (P.B.); Bloodline (Terence Young)
1981: They All Laughed (P.B.)
1983: Tales of Ordinary Madness (Marco Ferreri); The Girl from Trieste (Pasquale Festa Campanile)
1985: An Early Frost (John Erman)
1988: Don Bosco (Leandro Castellani)
1989: Road House (Rowdy Herrington)
1994: Parallel Lives (Linda Yellen)
1996: Shadow Conspiracy (George Cosmatos); Stag (Gavin Wilding)
1997: Farmer & Chase (Michael Seitzman); Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo)
1998: The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen); Happiness (Todd Solondz); The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet)
1999: Summer of Sam (Spike Lee); The Thomas Crown Affair (John McTiernan)
2004: Dogville (Lars von Trier)
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AUDREY HEPBURN
The first time it occurred to me that I might be lucky enough to make a picture with Audrey Hepburn was when Ben Gazzara walked into my kitchen in 1979 with groans of yearning, “Oh, my God, I’m in love! Oh, Audrey, my Audre
y!” Ben had just returned to Los Angeles from playing opposite Hepburn in Bloodline and couldn’t stop raving about her: “The sweetest woman I’ve ever known—she breaks your heart … Audrey’s a saint.” It’s true that for actors one of the most serious occupational hazards of filmmaking is falling in love with each other or with the director, and vice versa, but Gazzara and Hepburn—both at the time nearing the end of failed marriages to others—had a dear and passionate relationship during the filming of that picture.
Unfortunately for the movie, their scenes together were really the only things worth watching in it, especially unfortunate considering this was Audrey’s first film in three years, the last being Richard Lester’s terrific (but not markedly successful) Robin and Marian with Sean Connery in 1976. Prior to that, remember, she had not been seen on the screen for nearly a decade, not since the smash hit Wait Until Dark (1967), in which she played a blind woman in jeopardy and for which she received her fifth Best Actress Oscar nomination. She had spent those intervening years bringing up her two sons. Following Bloodline, Audrey would appear in only one other feature starring role: again with Ben Gazzara, and shot in Manhattan, They All Laughed was a romantic comedy we all made together—I wrote and directed—during the beautiful spring and early summer of 1980. While shooting, on May 4, we celebrated Audrey’s fifty-first birthday. Seven years later, she was lovely as ever playing the lead in a forgettable TV-movie, Love Among Thieves, and then—as, appropriately enough, a guardian angel—in Steven Spielberg’s Always (1989), devoting the rest of her life to her family and the world family of children she touched and nurtured through years of grueling UNICEF tours. In 1993, she died after a short bout with cancer; she was sixty-four.
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