by Mark Griffin
While on location in Italy’s Dolomite mountains, push came to shove in the form of a vitriolic sixteen-page, single-spaced typewritten memo that Selznick sent to Huston: “I should be less than candid with you if I didn’t tell you that I am most desperately unhappy about the way things are going. It is an experience that I feel is going to lead us, not to a better picture, as you and I discussed but to a worse one—because it will represent neither what you think the picture should be, nor what I think it should be . . .” It was all downhill from there. Selznick capped his comments with, “I’m sure you are an honest enough man to prefer resignation.” Later, Selznick would famously tell a reporter, “In Mr. Huston, I asked for a first violinist and instead got a conductor.”
“And that was the end of John Huston,” Rock would later say. “It was shot for a week or two without any director at all, though we had a second unit director.”* Charles Vidor, the director hired to replace Huston, had hit his peak in the 1940s directing Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Cover Girl. Vidor had served in the Austro-Hungarian army, but even that seemed uneventful compared to the incredibly contentious set of A Farewell to Arms. “He was a very nervous man,” remembered Oswald Morris, the British cinematographer. “Bit his nails, twiddled his fingers. He told me they had given him a great party when he left California and his friends were going to give him another one in three weeks, after he’d been fired from the movie.”
If Huston had been slavishly devoted to Hemingway’s text, Vidor seemed only too willing to veer away from it. As Selznick put it, “I have had to go from the defender of changes from the book to the defender of the book!” The language barrier between the American cast and crew and their Italian counterparts wasn’t the only communication challenge hindering the production. As Rock recalled, “I had these highly emotional scenes to do, crying and carrying on . . . and somebody who doesn’t know how to direct anybody says, ‘Okay, now . . . cry.’
“Well, it doesn’t just happen, now does it?”
Although Vittorio De Sica was revered as Italy’s great neorealist director (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan), he had been hired as an actor on A Farewell to Arms. De Sica would receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Major Alessandro Rinaldi, who suffers a breakdown after enduring one too many battlefront horrors. As Hudson remembered it, De Sica’s directorial instincts kicked in at a moment when his guidance was desperately needed. “De Sica was a marvelous man and a hell of a director,” Hudson said. “We were shooting in a little village up near the Austrian border, near the Alps. It’s the last shot of the picture and I had to come out of a building sobbing, walking right past the camera. And De Sica saw that the director didn’t know how to tell me what to do . . . We went into a dressing room and in his very limited English, talked to me. And he got me so grief stricken that I couldn’t stop crying. I did the scene and that was that.”
Hudson also clicked with Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, who made one of her rare film appearances as the wisecracking nurse Helen Ferguson. “I flipped over Rock Hudson,” said Stritch, who at the time was involved with actor Ben Gazzara. “I was so knocked out by Rock Hudson that I’d do my hair and make-up in my hotel room, just in case I would bump into Rock Hudson at six in the morning on my way to hair and make-up at the studio. He liked me. Asked me out a lot. I was in heaven. I mean, just seeing Rock Hudson come down a winding staircase in the grand hotel in Rome, in a tux, to take me out to dinner. I mean, it was just too much. Arrivederci, Ben Gazzara. And we all know what a bum decision that turned out to be.”
While Hudson bonded with his costars, everywhere else he turned, there was discord. After Charles Vidor received one too many Selznick memorandums, the director fired back: “The memo indicates that you think that you have on your hands a hopelessly inexperienced director. If you don’t stop this nonsense, I will think that I am stuck with a totally inexperienced producer. Now, for heaven’s sake, let me function or else come down and shoot it yourself.”
After Selznick accused Oswald Morris of favoring Hudson over Jennifer Jones with his camera set-ups, the veteran cinematographer walked (“Mr. Morris and I personally were not seeing eye to eye on photographic style,” Selznick told Variety.). Art director Stephen Grimes left after a blowout with production designer Alfred Junge. Then Selznick and associate producer Arthur Fellows reportedly came to blows while shooting a sequence in which Hudson and Jones, taking cover in a tiny rowboat, hide from a border patrol ship.
Although Selznick would say of his leading man, “I have never worked with a more cooperative actor than Rock,” this didn’t stop the producer from laying into him. “I do hope that Rock is going to work on his weight,” Selznick told Henry Willson. The producer found the star “far too bloated looking for a man who had done rugged ambulance service in Alpine warfare.” Selznick then advised one of the cinematographers, “Please keep your eye out for Rock Hudson’s Adam’s apple—which can be very unattractive pictorially and romantically, particularly if highlighted.”
Convinced that some of Rock’s nocturnal activities were affecting his on-screen appearance, Selznick issued a reprimand: “It would be in your own interests to cut down on the play and get more sleep until the picture is finished. It is all well and good for friends who don’t have your kind of assignment to keep you up till all hours, but they are unknowingly being the worst kind of enemies to you when they do this.”
She may have been half a world away, but Mrs. Hudson was another sticking point for Selznick. Hospitalized with a bout of hepatitis, Phyllis began badgering Rock to come home. Given the fact that Hudson was headlining a multimillion-dollar epic being shot in several remote locations, this didn’t seem to be the most reasonable request. Not surprisingly, Selznick refused.
Once she was on the mend, Phyllis tried again. She made it clear to Henry Willson that she wanted Selznick to release Rock so that they could attend the Academy Awards ceremony as a couple. The producer vetoed this as well. Then Phyllis and Henry began hounding Rock over the fact that all of the overtime on A Farewell to Arms was eating into a contractually guaranteed vacation. Selznick was infuriated. Not only was the constant nagging “damagingly distracting” to his leading man, but the producer couldn’t help but notice that Hudson seemed genuinely “frightened” of both his wife and his agent. Used to being controlled by both of them, Rock seemed incapable of making decisions himself.
In a telegram to his attorney, Barry Brannen, Selznick let it rip: “Try to make this obviously dim-witted woman understand that Hudson has literally knocked himself out for six months and that she’s doing the worst conceivable disservice to him by keeping him in this upset frame [of] mind . . . Hudson has pitifully told me [of his] total inability to make his nonprofessional wife understand situation, but even more incredible is that Willson so stupid.”
Years later, when asked to recall his long and disheartening days on A Farewell to Arms, Rock was unusually candid: “It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The director and Jennifer didn’t get along and there were lots of arguments . . . At the end, when you get into the tragedy of it in the hospital room and I had to start crying, what I was really crying about is that it was seven months of misery. I couldn’t stop once I started.”
Finally, in late 1957, it was all over. After five thousand Alpine troops had been put through their paces, two directors had come and gone, and the picture soared some $300,000 over budget, A Farewell to Arms was ready to be unveiled to the public.
In a movie season that included blockbusters like Peyton Place and The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Farewell to Arms (which Selznick touted as “A Theatrical Event of the First Magnitude”) was released on December 14, 1957. The reviews were not kind. “If there was a supreme Bad Taste Award for movies, A Farewell to Arms would win it hands down. This smutty version of Ernest Hemingway’s novel will set thousands of stomachs to turning,” said William K. Zinsser in his New York Herald-Tribune review. “Sweep and frankness alone don’t make a great picture; and Fare
well suffers from an overdose of both,” said Variety.
As for Rock’s work, The Hollywood Reporter (clearly unaware of all that had taken place during the protracted shoot) wrote, “Hudson is an actor who is exceptionally responsive to direction and under Charles Vidor he gives one of his best performances.” The New York Times, however, wasn’t sold on either of the leads. “The essential excitement of a violent love is strangely missing in the studied performances that Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones give. The show of devotion between the two people is intensely acted, not realized. It is questionable, indeed, whether Mr. Hudson and Miss Jones have the right personalities for these roles.”
Eventually, even David O. Selznick* conceded defeat: “I take credit for my pictures when they are good, so I must take the blame when they are disappointing . . . A Farewell to Arms is a job of which I am not especially proud.” Looked at today, Selznick’s A Farewell to Arms—as opposed to Hemingway’s—is steadfastly determined to be Monumentally Impressive. Haunted by his early triumph with Gone With the Wind, the producer seems intent on recapturing its epic grandeur. It also doesn’t help that Jones is far too mature for her role. In an early scene, when she mentions that she was engaged to a “boy” who was killed, it sounds strange rather than poignant.
In spite of the off-screen chaos he endured, Hudson manages a respectable performance throughout the picture. Toward the end of the film, he is superb in one scene in which a distraught Lieutenant Henry retreats to a café after being told that his newborn son has died. While muttering to himself about his experiences in the war, Henry subconsciously lines up a bunch of sugar cubes as though they are troops on the battlefield and then flattens them. This sequence, and Rock’s final solemn walk through the deserted streets after learning that Catherine has died, were among the strongest scenes in the film. But as Hudson himself pointed out, was this really acting or simply emotional exhaustion blown up to CinemaScope proportions?
Chapter 11
The Tarnished Angels
“It got me so damn mad because I had to compromise,” Rock would say of the studio interference he encountered while making The Tarnished Angels (1958). Hudson had prepared to play his seedy character exactly as described by William Faulkner but Universal executives wouldn’t stand for it.
(Photo courtesy of Photofest)
The producer wanted to call it Sex in the Air. The director considered the script well plotted but undramatic. The leading man was willing to cast aside his pretty boy image and go grunge, but the studio would have none of it. The Oscar-winning leading lady was shooting two films simultaneously and was understandably exhausted. And if all that wasn’t enough, a stunt pilot was killed during production.
Despite the countless challenges involved in its making and the critical drubbing it received upon release, The Tarnished Angels would ultimately emerge as one of director Douglas Sirk’s most revered efforts. The last of the Hudson and Sirk collaborations is also widely considered the finest screen adaptation of a William Faulkner novel—in this case, Pylon, published in 1935.
In Depression-era New Orleans, Burke Devlin, a boozy, disillusioned Times-Picayune reporter, is assigned to cover an unorthodox trio of barnstormers who regularly risk their lives performing at air shows across the country. The journalist befriends former World War I fighter pilot Roger Schumann, his parachutist wife, LaVerne (billed as “The Distaff Daredevil”), and their devoted mechanic, Jiggs. After Schumann’s plane is damaged in a crash, he encourages LaVerne to seduce wealthy promoter Matt Ord in exchange for his rickety plane, which is so ill-equipped to compete in an air race that a devastating tragedy results.
After the commercial triumph of Written on the Wind, producer Albert Zugsmith seemed intent on not only recapturing its box office success but also reassembling virtually the same cast for The Tarnished Angels. Rock would play the down-at-the-heels reporter, Robert Stack the air ace, and Dorothy Malone the much coveted LaVerne.
George Zuckerman, who had scripted Written on the Wind, was hired to adapt Faulkner’s Pylon.* “They paid Faulkner fifty grand only after I had written a two-page memo on how I could get the script past censorship,” Zuckerman said. The main concern for the Production Code office being the novel’s suggestion of a ménage à trois involving Schumann, LaVerne, and Jiggs. There was also a problematic flashback sequence in which Schumann and Jiggs roll the dice to determine who should claim responsibility for LaVerne’s unborn child. That scene alone would inspire Francis Cardinal Spellman of the Catholic Legion of Decency to take to his pulpit.
Back in the director’s chair, Douglas Sirk couldn’t have been more excited about The Tarnished Angels. Ever since he had read a German translation of Faulkner’s novel, he had longed to adapt it for the screen. Sirk was impressed with Zuckerman’s initial efforts but did express one major reservation. “Strangely enough, the story does not speak to my heart,” Sirk wrote in a letter to Al Zugsmith. “For reasons not yet quite clear to me, everything appears to take place on a very distant stage, very far removed from where we are . . . A plot full of possibilities for drama results in the present script in a minimum of drama.”
As Sirk encouraged Zuckerman to show rather than tell in his rewrite, the leading man was already getting into character. Exhibiting the same sort of enthusiasm that he had during preproduction on A Farewell to Arms, Rock was eager to play Faulkner’s cadaverous reporter, whom the author described as “like a scarecrow in a winter field,” shabbily outfitted in “the raked disreputable hat, the suit that looked as if someone else had just finished sleeping in it.” Rock sprang into action.
“I went down into the poorer section of Los Angeles and bought second, even third hand clothes—shirts with collars that were frayed, shoes with heels that were downtrodden . . . The studio executives saw the way I was dressed and they came down on the set in a fury. They said, ‘What in the world are you doing? You can’t play the part like that. You’re a star! You have to be well dressed.’ After that, we had to reshoot the whole thing. I even had to wear a fedora with ‘Press’ written in the hat band. It made Douglas so angry and me so angry, that I just said, ‘The hell with it. Let’s just get through this and get on to the next picture.’”
Years later, Sirk revealed that he actually had a hand in steering the characterization of Burke Devlin away from Faulkner’s consumptive skeleton and back toward Rock Hudson’s clean-cut image. In the end, the Universal-approved Burke Devlin was as neatly turned out as the Arrow Collar Man. And while there are hints that Devlin is leading a life of quiet desperation, a perfectly groomed Hudson looks like the toughest thing he’s lived through is an especially long night at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge. Although understandably frustrated by not being able to play the character the way he envisioned it, Rock not only maintained his professionalism but regularly treated his costars to characteristic displays of goodwill.
Dorothy Malone, who was shooting Tip on a Dead Jockey at the same time as The Tarnished Angels, remembered Hudson as “gallant” and a “tender type.” The actress recalled that Rock patiently translated some of Sirk’s more oblique directions for her. When an obnoxious drunk hassled Malone while the company was on location in San Diego, Hudson quietly and calmly intervened.
Expectant father Robert Stack also felt supported by his costar. In the midst of completing a scene with character actor Robert Middleton, Stack was stunned when an antique plane suddenly zoomed into view. A tattered banner trailing behind it announced: “It’s A Girl.” Hudson had arranged with the hospital to let him know when Stack’s wife had given birth.
Rock was also instrumental in having twenty-one-year-old newcomer (and Henry Willson client) Troy Donahue cast as the ill-fated speed flier Frank Burnham. But was this another example of Hudson’s professional generosity or, in this case, were there strings attached? “He saw me as a score,” Donahue admitted years later. The actor would deny that he had been intimately involved with Hudson, but Mark Miller insisted that Troy had personally
“auditioned” for Rock, which led to his casting in the film, thereby launching the career of yet another beefcake idol.
The seemingly endless procession of good-looking hunks that turned up in small roles in Rock’s films—gas station attendants, traffic cops, bellboys—never ceased to amaze and amuse George Nader and Mark Miller. The minute some succulent blond turned up in Rock’s latest movie, they instantly knew that it was probably not the young man’s dramatic abilities that had landed him a speaking role in the film. Hudson’s casting calls tended to claim whatever leisure time he could find, but once he was on the set he was all business.
“Even though he was the biggest star in the world at that time, Rock would never just coast on his stardom,” said actor William Schallert, who played one of Hudson’s newsroom colleagues. “When we were getting ready to shoot a scene, he’d be sitting by himself, studying his script. He wasn’t admiring himself in the mirror or counting how many close-ups he had. He was focused on getting into character . . . It truly was a pleasant surprise for me to discover how dedicated he was. And I really thought Rock did some of his finest work in that picture . . . though at that point, I think people just took him for granted.”
Not only would one of Rock’s most committed performances of the 1950s go unnoticed, but critics at the time couldn’t find much good to say about Sirk’s movie in general: “The Tarnished Angels is a stumbling entry,” wrote the reviewer for Variety. “Characters are mostly colorless, given static reading in drawn-out situations, and story line is lacking in punch.”
The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther liked it even less: “Mr. Faulkner’s faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours . . . but there is preciously little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.” Several decades after The Tarnished Angels was almost unanimously panned, contemporary critics would take a second look. Upon closer inspection, an underappreciated gem was found hiding beneath all of those raspberries. The praise—though belated—was so rapturous and sincere, one wonders if the critics who had initially blasted The Tarnished Angels had actually seen the same film.
