by Mark Griffin
During a savage attack by the Mau Mau guerrillas, members of McKenzie’s family are killed and some of Kimani’s relatives are implicated. Ultimately, Peter and Kimani find themselves on opposing sides of the ongoing conflict, though both struggle with the personal and ethical ambiguities of their situation. At one point, when his loyalties are questioned, Peter responds, “You can’t spend the first twenty years of your life with someone sharing bread and secrets and dreams and then one day say, ‘Sorry, it’s all over. We live in different worlds.’”
Prior to the publication of Ruark’s novel, MGM had bought the movie rights to the book from Doubleday for $300,000. Once Something of Value reached the top of the bestseller list, the studio assigned producer Pandro Berman to bring the story to the screen. One of the producer’s recent hits, Blackboard Jungle, had been directed by Richard Brooks, known for bringing an unflinching, pseudo-documentary style to his films. As well as an explosive temper to his sets.
Blackboard Jungle had not only provided a glimpse of an inner-city teacher’s daily struggles at an interracial school, but it also offered some sharp-eyed social commentary on juvenile delinquency and racial strife. Though the film was controversial, it was also a hit. MGM hoped that Brooks could bring the same kind of bold, direct-from-the-headlines approach to Something of Value. Once Brooks signed on as director, he traveled to Kenya to scout locations and conduct research (which included consulting with Samadu Jackson, an actual African witch doctor). Meanwhile, Pandro Berman turned his attention to casting.
MGM had been grooming British leading man Bill Travers for stardom, pairing him on screen with the likes of Ava Gardner and Jennifer Jones. Travers was undeniably photogenic and came equipped with a British accent, making him a natural choice for the role of Peter McKenzie. However, studio executives were insistent that a powerful box office draw was needed to carry Something of Value. Suddenly, Travers was out and Berman was in negotiations with Universal to borrow their top star, Rock Hudson.
From the beginning, Berman had only one actor in mind to play the adult Kimani: Sidney Poitier. The twenty-nine-year-old had made an indelible impression as a rebellious student in Blackboard Jungle. Even though he had gained notice appearing in one of MGM’s most profitable films, the actor still wasn’t treated very respectfully. Beyond Berman’s office, Poitier was referred to only as “the colored boy” in studio correspondence, which is both sad and ironic, considering the racial themes being explored in Something of Value. Not to mention the fact that the desegregation of America’s schools was dominating headlines as the film went into production.
Once on location in Nairobi, the company encountered no end of challenges. The New Stanley Hotel, where the cast and crew were registered, would not permit Poitier to stay there. “Well, then, we have a problem,” Rock informed his director. “Whatever you want to do, move or whatever, is all right with me.” After learning how much Poitier typically earned to appear in films, the owners of the hotel suddenly changed their minds. As the manager told Brooks, “They have decided anyone who makes thirty thousand dollars for three months’ work is not black.”
With the issue of accommodations settled, it was time to embark on a field trip. Nearly forty years after the fact, Rock would recount this harrowing expedition in chilling detail: “One Sunday morning, the cameraman [Russell Harlan], the director, Sidney Poitier and myself, were taken out into this field with a white hunter,” Hudson remembered. “We were told to stand and be quiet and not move, or we would be shot. When the Mau Mau found out that they were safe, they came out of the bushes and surrounded us. It was fucking terrifying! I never saw such hatred in the eyes . . . black, piercing eyes. They could look right through you and just sever you right in two. The white hunter introduced us as visitors from another country and said we wanted to meet them. I was a little self-conscious, to say the least. I offered my hand to shake hands. Finally, the leader decided to shake my hand and did. Now the tension’s over. I started to put my hands in my pocket and he said, ‘Don’t put your hands in your pocket! You’re wiping away the handshake!’ Oh, Jesus Christ! It was a scary situation.”
And it wasn’t only the Mau Mau who were scary. Assistant director Robert Relyea recalled that director Brooks, a former Marine, “believed if he could make the actors hate him—make them want to kill him—it would come across on the screen as pure anger as it related to the story he was filming.”
When a group of terrified extras was assembled before him, Brooks dispensed with pleasantries. “You’ll be lucky if you’re still alive after this is over!” he bellowed. The director welcomed Phyllis Gates to the Dark Continent with, “There isn’t one thing here that won’t kill you.” And after leading lady Dana Wynter phoned her attorney boyfriend one afternoon, Brooks shouted to his assistant director, “Bob, do you think you can get that broad off the phone talking to her faggot boyfriend?” Relyea remembered that Brooks reserved most of his abuse for the film’s leading man. “Because he felt Rock Hudson couldn’t convey the anxiety and anger his character demanded without prodding, Brooks treated Rock badly, doing his best to make him miserable.”
While Brooks’s methods may have been brutal, at least in Rock’s case, they appear to have been effective. Particularly in his scenes with Poitier, Hudson achieves an “in the moment” aliveness and intensity he ordinarily didn’t display on-screen. In a climactic exchange, Peter and Kimani discuss how they’ve come to be on opposite sides of the battle. “What’s happened to us? When did this hatred begin?” Kimani asks. “Before we were born, I think,” Peter responds. In the film’s most powerful scene, Hudson’s weary resignation rings true.
As for the picture itself, Something of Value is extremely ambitious, occasionally riveting but not altogether successful. Director Brooks strives to achieve a kind of unsettling cinema verité experience. Some elements of the film readily lend themselves to this approach while others seem in direct opposition to it. In those moments when Kimani is anguished over being pulled in different directions by his conflicting allegiances, Poitier is extremely compelling. Overall, the sequences focused on the Mau Mau have an authenticity and power that the episodes on the McKenzie family farm do not.
Although Rock and company were halfway around the world from MGM, Hollywood was never too far away. After Brooks went to the trouble of transporting his cast and crew to Kenya, many of the scenes—even the exteriors—have a curiously artificial soundstage look and feel about them. The Culver City influence is at its most intrusive in the scenes between Peter and Holly Keith, his “betrothed.” Here Brooks’s film is less like a Pathé newsreel and more like outtakes from Mogambo. It’s obvious that the interludes with the young lovers exist only to satisfy the studio’s mandatory quota of big-screen romance.
Though the reviewer for Time would cheekily dismiss Something of Value as “moments in bhwa-nality,” other critics were far more impressed. In his Commonweal review, Philip T. Hartung called Something of Value, “forceful though hard-to-take . . . expertly played by Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier . . . It covers too complex a subject and it depends too often for its effect on cruelty that is almost unbearable to watch.”
The role of Peter McKenzie would prove to be one of the most physically demanding of Hudson’s career. He later told friends that between the unrelenting African heat, his daily workouts on the set, and the stress caused by every Richard Brooks tantrum, he shed some fifteen pounds while the film was in production. Almost as taxed as her husband was, Phyllis was nervous and edgy during her weeks in Kenya. On one of Rock’s rare days off, she made the mistake of broaching the subject of their troubled relationship. “I don’t want to talk about it,” was Hudson’s terse reply. Before shooting wrapped, Phyllis flew back to Los Angeles alone.
* * *
One afternoon in 1957, Rock’s secretary, Lois Rupert, rushed into his office with an urgent message. “Rock, there’s a man on the phone and he says he’s your father!” While Hudson had remained on good terms
with his sister and cousins on either side of the family, Rupert understood that Rock’s relationship with his father was strained.
“I was surprised when he took the call,” Rupert said. “I got up from my desk and closed his office door to give him privacy. It was only a couple of minutes later that Rock opened the door and walked into my office. He did not look happy.” Rupert would never forget Rock’s heartbroken expression as he quietly said, “He didn’t even ask how I was. He just wanted $5,000.”
Rock explained that his father was a gambler and was frequently down on his luck. “I learned that he had called before from Las Vegas, saying he’d had a heart attack and needed money fast. But later Rock learned it was untrue. His father had been a heavy loser in the casinos and needed money to pay his debts,” said Rupert. “Certainly for Mr. Scherer, it was nice to have a son who was a rich and famous movie star—at least when he needed money. Rock seemed to be nothing more than his father’s banker. The debts were never repaid. Rock knew that his father thought he ‘owed’ it to him simply because his father’s seed had given him life. Rock seemed to accept the ‘guilt’ and always gave him money whenever he asked for it. He was just the son that had been unloved by his father and over-loved by his mother.”
Chapter 10
A Farewell to Arms
Director Charles Vidor, leading lady Jennifer Jones, and Rock on location for David O. Selznick's troubled production of A Farewell to Arms (1957).
(Photo courtesy of Photofest)
Ernest Hemingway would refer to it as “my long tale of transalpine fornication.” Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway’s second novel and first widely acclaimed bestseller. Based on the writer’s own experiences as a Red Cross volunteer on the Italian front during World War I, A Farewell to Arms was hailed as “a high achievement in what might be termed the new romanticism.” The novel’s unflinching depictions of wartime atrocities are sharply contrasted with its tender though ultimately ill-fated love story.
In 1918, Hemingway had been seriously wounded while serving as an ambulance driver in northern Italy. During his convalescence, the eighteen-year-old engaged in a short-lived dalliance with an older American nurse. Their fleeting relationship was reworked in A Farewell to Arms into a passionate Romeo and Juliet–style romance. In the novel, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American, falls for Catherine Barkley, a British nurse caring for him at a newly installed American hospital in Milan.
In 1932, A Farewell to Arms made its first trip to the screen in the form of an Oscar-winning Paramount production starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. “There is too much sentiment and not enough strength in the pictorial conception of Ernest Hemingway’s novel,” declared the New York Times. Hemingway hated the arbitrary, studio-imposed happy ending. Even so, Depression-era audiences turned out in droves. Future mogul David O. Selznick always regretted that he hadn’t produced the first film version of A Farewell to Arms himself. But by the time Paramount’s adaptation was in theatres, Selznick had already resigned his post as executive assistant at the studio.
Fiercely ambitious and intensely driven, Selznick always envisioned bigger things for himself. Through his own Selznick International Pictures, he would produce what many considered Hollywood’s finest achievement, a sweeping adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s “Story of the Old South.” Gone With the Wind showcased all of Selznick’s strengths as a producer: an ability to merge the literary and the cinematic, an obsessive attention to even the most microscopic details, and a genius for presentational showmanship.
Despite Selznick’s extraordinary achievements, A Farewell to Arms remained elusive. Said Selznick, “It broke my heart that I was too young a producer to make it when it was first filmed. Through many long years, I tried to acquire it.” In 1951, Warner Brothers—which now owned the rights to A Farewell to Arms—released Force of Arms. This version updated the action to World War II while reuniting the stars of Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Nancy Olson (“They Met Under Fire and Their Love Flamed!”). The picture was poorly received and in light of this, Selznick realized that his long-deferred dream of remaking A Farewell to Arms would probably never materialize.
However, just a few years later and through a strange turn of events, Selznick would finally get his way. Warner Brothers was about to release its highly anticipated musical remake of A Star Is Born, which represented an important comeback for Judy Garland. Seventeen years earlier, Selznick had produced the 1937 version of A Star Is Born and still owned the foreign distribution rights to that title. Ever the shrewd negotiator, Selznick brokered a deal with Warners. He would relinquish his foreign rights to A Star Is Born plus pay $25,000 in exchange for the remake rights to A Farewell to Arms. Backed into a corner, Warners agreed. Though it was another studio—20th Century-Fox—that consented to finance and distribute David O. Selznick’s latest spectacular, which came complete with an Oscar-winning leading lady.
From the beginning, Selznick envisioned A Farewell to Arms as Jennifer Jones’s finest hour. He was determined that his wife would surpass the strong performances she had given in Madame Bovary and Carrie. But while Jones had been temperamentally well suited to those roles, having her play a young nurse and one “full of bubbling energy” seemed something of a stretch. At thirty-eight, Jones was eighteen years older than Hemingway’s heroine. Nevertheless, Selznick convinced himself that between her Academy Award–winning credentials and his own ingenuity, they could overcome any obstacles.
In terms of a director, A Farewell to Arms required the services of a master storyteller, one capable of marshaling the troops while not losing sight of the character-driven aspects of the love story. To many observers, the director’s toughest challenge would involve any attempts to “collaborate” with his notoriously hands-on producer. “Most directors these days don’t want to work with me,” Selznick admitted. The producer’s legendarily exhaustive memos were enough to scare away the faint of heart.
However, there was at least one member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) who seemed capable of taking on both Hemingway and Selznick. A Renaissance man whose résumé included stints as a boxer, a portrait artist, and a Mexican cavalry rider, John Huston had directed everything from The Maltese Falcon to Moulin Rouge. What’s more, he was responsible for two of Mrs. Selznick’s finest efforts, We Were Strangers and the cult favorite Beat the Devil. And even before production had begun on A Farewell to Arms, Huston had managed to win over the ultimate tough customer—Hemingway himself. “Papa liked his ideas,” said Huston’s biographer, William Nolan. “Both men felt that the book would make a powerful film.”
Despite the fact that the project seemed to be in very capable hands, there were not so subtle hints of the trouble to come in a 1956 memo from Selznick to Huston. At the time Selznick sent his wire, the director was shooting Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in the British West Indies. For once, the typically long-winded producer cut right to the chase: “Could you concentrate wholly on Farewell until completion of photography, after which believe you would feel safe leaving post-production, including editing, entirely [in] my hands?”
A collaboration between Selznick and Huston may have sounded smart in theory, but in reality, these two strong-willed titans seemed destined to collide. If Huston was spontaneous and open to improvisational experimentation, Selznick left nothing to chance. Including the script. Selznick and screenwriter Ben Hecht would ultimately slog their way through no less than nine versions of the screenplay. With each new draft, Hemingway’s anti-war story seemed to recede into the background while a romantic vehicle for Jennifer Jones shifted into sharper focus.
While Huston insisted on a more faithful adaptation, Selznick was convinced that lifting scenes directly from Hemingway’s novel would result in a script that was “unplayable and undramatizable.” In another round of memos, the producer admonished Huston for treating Hemingway’s novel as though it were “Holy Writ.” As Huston continued “torturing” the script (as Selznick put
it), the producer turned his attention to Lieutenant Henry. With the leading lady a foregone conclusion, this left the crucial casting of Hemingway’s hero. “It’s of utmost importance . . . that we have the ideal male lead,” Selznick told 20th Century-Fox President Spyros Skouras. “And the ideal is Rock Hudson.”
At thirty-one, Hudson was more than a few deployments too old for Lieutenant Henry, but his popularity and box office supremacy convinced Selznick that he was the perfect choice: “Rock Hudson is the first romantic idol since Gary Cooper and Clark Gable . . . He’s got it—the thing that is indescribable. I was delighted we could get him. He’s got a warm, likable quality that will last for years and years.”
Rock was equally enthusiastic about headlining a $5 million prestige picture to be shot on location throughout Italy and Austria. And in CinemaScope and “the wonder of stereophonic sound,” no less. In fact, Hudson was so certain of the film’s blockbuster potential that he passed on playing the lead in Joshua Logan’s Sayonara (which netted Marlon Brando another Oscar nomination) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American (which Jean-Luc Godard would call the best movie of 1958). Let his fellow members in the Screen Actors Guild take on the Korean War or the geopolitics of Indochina . . . Rock Hudson had Hemingway.
Decades later, it would appear that at a pivotal moment in his career, Rock had made a questionable decision, but at the time, considering all of the elements involved, it seemed like a sure thing: “I did A Farewell to Arms. Why? A classic story produced by David O. Selznick, who made Gone With the Wind. You can’t go wrong there. Directed by John Huston . . . can’t go wrong there. And a hell of a good acting cast . . . Jennifer, Vittorio De Sica. So, I went with that. And little by little, things started chipping away. For example, Huston was fired the day before the picture began.”
