All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Before Hornet’s Nest was released in September of 1970, Rock told George Nader that he had no idea how the film would be received but he felt that Mark Colleano was deserving of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. However, once the picture opened, it would be ignored by the public and largely dismissed by critics—the Los Angeles Times called it “an overly long, routine action programmer.” If Hudson had long ago learned to dust himself off and keep moving after a disappointment, his underage colleagues were hurt by the indifferent reception to the film.

  “I was really sad because when the movie came out in England, it was on the second half of a bill with They Call Me Mister Tibbs!” Colleano remembers. “Our film didn’t catch on at all, which was very disappointing because we all had such hopes. Hornet’s Nest put a lot of pressure on me. I did feel a bit emotionally drawn after that experience and I’m sure that Rock did, too. When the Hollywood thing didn’t happen for me, I kind of crashed a bit. One of my friends once said, ‘You’ve been in some of the most prestigious flops ever made.’”

  Chapter 15

  Whistling Away the Dark

  “It’s really too bad what happened with that movie,” Robert Osborne said of Darling Lili (1970). The production was plagued by bad weather and bad press. Hudson had hoped to bond with leading lady Julie Andrews but walked away disappointed.

  (Photo courtesy of Photofest)

  1970. It was the same year that Jack Nicholson became a star while rebelling against pretty much everything in Five Easy Pieces. It was also the same year that 20th Century-Fox presented Raquel Welch as a subversive transsexual, hell-bent on “the destruction of the American male in all its particulars” in Myra Breckinridge. And Warner Brothers had one of their biggest hits that year with the documentary Woodstock, which captured the ultimate counterculture festival in all of its ganja-scented glory.

  Over at Paramount Pictures, however, the studio seemed to be stuck in a culturally oblivious time warp. Their new catchphrase may have been “Paramount Is Where It’s Happening,” but that hardly seemed to be the case as a new decade dawned. Studio executives were rolling the dice on several old-fashioned, family friendly musicals, hoping to replicate the blockbuster success of such smashes as The Sound of Music and Funny Girl.

  “I think that the people who were still in power in the movie business, by and large, did not understand the change in the sensibility of the times,” says Peter Bart, who served as Paramount’s vice president during the studio’s turbulent years of transition. “Charles Bluhdorn, who had bought Gulf and Western and Paramount, was a very traditional European person and his favorite movie was The Sound of Music. That was his taste. So, he was totally ill-equipped to understand the American taste and the major changes taking place at that time.”

  Bluhdorn seemed obsessed with one star in particular: Julie Andrews. Paramount’s president was hoping that Andrews could do for his studio what she had already done for Disney (Mary Poppins), Fox (The Sound of Music), and Universal (Thoroughly Modern Millie). For a time in the 1960s, it seemed that whatever Julie touched turned to gold. In fact, by mid-decade, Andrews was second only to John Wayne as the top-grossing film star in the world. Encouraged by the record-breaking box office receipts from Julie’s string of hits, Bluhdorn was eager to have Andrews and her four-octave range grace a Paramount production the moment she became available. In order to sweeten the deal, the studio offered Andrews’s soon-to-be husband, Blake Edwards, virtual carte blanche—the opportunity to write and direct whatever film she starred in.

  Paramount’s project was initially saddled with the lumbering title, Darling Lili, or Where Were You the Night You Said You Shot Down Baron von Richtofen? before it was shortened to the marquee-friendly Darling Lili. Screenwriter William Peter Blatty had collaborated with Edwards on his earlier comedies, A Shot in the Dark and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Still a couple of years away from publishing his landmark bestseller The Exorcist, Blatty was tapped to resurrect a pet project of Edwards’s that had been languishing.

  “Blake and I had worked together before and I admired him very much but there had already been problems in getting this new project off the ground,” Blatty recalls. “Having failed to get Jack Lemmon interested in an idea he had for a World War I–era romantic comedy, Blake started dating Julie Andrews, and after a time asked me if I could come up with a way to make a female—namely Julie—the star of the film. I managed to do it overnight, the ultimate result being Darling Lili.”

  As it was set during World War I, Darling Lili was anything but up to the minute, though it would give Andrews an opportunity to play something other than an unflappable governess. She would portray Lili Schmidt, a German spy masquerading as adored English music hall entertainer Lili Smith.

  With a score that included “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” the semi-musical didn’t seem quite in tune with the era of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. But who cared? Andrews was one of the most bankable names in the business. Whether her costars happened to be adorable Austrian moppets or animated penguins, Julie could be counted on to make anything work. What’s more, Blake Edwards had a strong track record of his own, having directed such contemporary classics as The Pink Panther and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Believing like everyone else that he was boarding a victory train bound for box-office glory, Rock agreed to play Major William Larrabee, the Allied squadron commander, who happens to be Lili’s primary target; her assignment is to seduce the major and gain information concerning what the Allies have planned for the escalating air war. While attempting to extract privileged information from Larrabee, Lili falls in love with him.

  With location shooting scheduled for Ireland, Belgium, and France, Darling Lili would be one of the most elaborate productions of Hudson’s career. Lili would prove to be so complex, in fact, that the mere one hundred days of shooting originally allotted to the production were soon a distant memory. More than two years would pass between Darling Lili’s first day of principal photography, March 18, 1968, and its theatrical release on June 24, 1970.

  In the intervening twenty-eight months, major changes occurred on the world stage and in Hollywood. America’s involvement in the Vietnam War dominated the headlines, making a World War I saga seem all the more out of touch. At the neighborhood movie house, extravagantly budgeted escapist fare had been overthrown in favor of grittier, antiestablishment character studies like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. With a budget that started at $11 million and which eventually ballooned to an estimated $24 million, Darling Lili was one seriously overpriced antique.

  But no fear. With two of the most likeable and charismatic stars in the business on board—the picture was a sure bet. At least until it became painfully obvious that Rock Hudson and Julie Andrews exhibited zero screen chemistry. “Their supposedly steamy love scenes had as much fizzle as day-old beer,” remembered Peter Bart, who, as Paramount’s junior executive, was required to screen the Darling Lili dailies. “Julie Andrews, totally believable as the faithful nanny in Mary Poppins, was never a threat to Marilyn Monroe as a sex goddess. As for Hudson, his predilection for men was becoming widely suspected in Hollywood . . . Their mutual disinterest, if not distaste, was abundantly visible in take after take as they embraced and kissed and then, when the director yelled ‘cut,’ they wiped their lips and breathed a sigh of relief.”

  It’s often been said that the camera does not lie and in the case of Darling Lili, the strained atmosphere that existed on the set is almost palpable on-screen. From the beginning, Edwards’s movie was plagued with bad luck and bad press. As the International Herald Tribune reported, most of the highly publicized delays were blamed on “waiting for the weather.” “Sometimes we wait for days and days,” Julie explained to a visitor. “And how do you pass the time?” the guest inquired. “We cry a lot,” Miss Andrews said. It rained in Dublin. It rained in Paris. In Brussels, it not only rained but the company was greete
d with a “U.S. Go Home!” banner. Union officials alleged that Paramount was infringing on Belgian labor laws.

  In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Joyce Haber seemed to delight in reporting every misfortune that befell the beleaguered Lili team (such as when a shot involving 2,000 extras was postponed three times). While the film was still in production, Haber regularly took Andrews to task, suggesting that the actress, who was ordinarily the consummate professional, had suddenly gone diva. After Andrews canceled a few public appearances at the last minute, Haber began referring to her as “The ‘Star’ who is beginning to make Barbra Streisand seem like Goody Two Shoes.” Typically, Haber would shoot straight from the hip and name names but, occasionally, she resorted to aliases when one of her blind items was especially salacious. In one notorious Haber column, she suggested that “Miss P and P” (the prim and proper Andrews), “Mr. X, the director” (Edwards), and “Mr. V.V.” (the “Visually Virile” Hudson) were not only having a ménage à trois but were regularly spotted in San Francisco’s hard-core leather bars, allegations that Andrews and Edwards heatedly denied. It was stories like this that prompted the classic Andrews rejoinder, “They should give Haber open-heart surgery and go in through the feet.”

  According to some of Rock’s friends, he was genuinely unhappy throughout the drawn-out shoot, though he never brought his troubles to the set. “When he did the movie with Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, he did not feel welcomed by them,” says Hudson’s The Vegas Strip War costar Dennis Holahan. “Other than speaking to him on the set, they never spoke to him. It’s strange because anybody who worked with Blake usually adored him but I can tell you that Rock did not have a good experience working for them.” Others recall that Hudson had hoped to bond with Andrews as he had with Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day.

  “It’s really too bad what happened with that movie,” says film historian Robert Osborne. “I know that the big disappointment for Rock on Darling Lili is that he was so looking forward to working with Julie Andrews and for some reason, I don’t think he and Blake Edwards got along all that well . . . Julie is a total pro and a lovely lady but she also had a complicated husband that she adored . . . Rock tried his best, but the experience was not what he had expected.”

  Highly original and incredibly ambitious, Darling Lili seems to be in the throes of an identity crisis as it unreels. Is it a romantic comedy? An adventure yarn? A quasi-musical? With all of the intrigue involving wild chases through the streets of Paris, code books being stashed under mattresses, and aerial dogfights with the Red Baron—Darling Lili is overloaded with plot and spectacle.

  Interestingly, the movie works best when the espionage takes a breather and makes way for a Julie Andrews ditty. Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s original songs, including the Oscar-nominated “Whistling Away the Dark,” give Andrews an opportunity to display all of the colors in her wide-ranging musical repertoire. What’s more, she looks ravishing in her Donald Brooks costumes and Edwards’s camera is captivated by her every move. With Dame Julie commanding center stage, second-billed Rock Hudson is left to fend for himself. Given the fact that he isn’t awarded nearly as much screen time as his leading lady, Hudson seems like just another handsome set piece—one that nearly gets lost amid the Chippendale breakfronts, crystal chandeliers, and other sumptuous bric-a-brac.

  Screenwriter William Peter Blatty felt that the picture was also thrown off balance due to a few questionable decisions. “I loved and respected Blake, but I disagreed with his final cut of the film,” says Blatty. “Our premise was that while Lili would sleep with a general or two to worm out secret battle plans, she in fact despises men to the point of wondering whether she’s a lesbian. But there in reel one, we find Lili in a hot physical embrace with her German control. I know this stuff is typical writer nit-picking, but I really think it hurt the film.”

  The reviews ranged from the hostile (“Blake Edwards’ attempted spoof of World War I spying emerges as infantile in every respect”—New York magazine) to the adoring (“The overall effect is surprisingly sweet”—Saturday Review). Though most critics, like Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, found themselves of two minds: “It is certainly no effort to enjoy Darling Lili . . . yet it is painful to see so painstaking and fantastically costly an enterprise mounted on so flimsy and indeed questionable a story premise . . . the effect is of a skyscraper erected on Rice Krispies.” In the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris saluted Rock’s ability to maintain a straight face: “Hudson’s performance in Darling Lili should be studied by all the off-off-Broadway phenoms as a model of straight behavioralism in even the zaniest context.”

  Upon its release, Darling Lili was branded “the $24 Million Valentine.” As Paramount’s head of production, Robert Evans, would later observe, “Darling Lili was Blake Edwards’s wedding gift to his lady love and Paramount paid the bill. The film’s losses were so exorbitant that, were it not for [Bluhdorn’s] brilliant manipulation of the numbers, Paramount Pictures would have been changed to Paramount Cemetery.”

  As for Rock Hudson, the commercial failure of Darling Lili quickened his downhill slide at the box office and the production was not one that he would remember fondly. However, there was one endearing tie to the film that Hudson would never forget. Her name was “Veronique.” Or at least that’s how she would be referred to in the press. Described in Photoplay as “an 8-year-old ragamuffin from the slums of Paris,” Veronique was one of twenty-five students enrolled in a day school for underprivileged children that the producers of Darling Lili recruited to appear in a musical sequence with Julie Andrews.

  With her dark brown hair, huge hazel eyes, and winning disposition, Veronique captivated virtually everyone with whom she came in contact. Though no one was more enchanted than the film’s leading man. He bought her ice cream, raced her through flower fields, and carried her around on his shoulders. She taught him French songs and nicknamed him le gentil géant. It wasn’t long before Rock was envisioning himself as Veronique’s legal guardian.

  “One day, out of the blue, I asked myself, ‘What if I adopted her? Took her home with me? I love her already, and she loves me. Why not?’” An unmarried movie star adopting a poor Parisian moppet? It sounded an awful lot like some shameless press agent’s invention, but according to those close to Hudson, he couldn’t have been more serious. “I thought long and hard. I thought how great it would be to have the child with me in my house because I really loved her so,” Hudson told writer Henry Gris. “I’ve thought of adopting a child many times. If I haven’t, it’s mainly because, obviously, I’m single.”

  Rock’s bachelorhood wasn’t the only obstacle. Although Veronique was being cared for at what was essentially an orphanage, her parents were still very much alive, just not financially able to provide for her. Through an intermediary, Hudson broached the idea of legally adopting the child and raising her in America. “The message I received was a proud, ‘No, you are very kind, Monsieur, and all that, but you can’t have her.’ It was quite a blow,” Hudson later recalled. “They wouldn’t give her up, but I could take her for one year. It was the most they would allow . . . But what would happen at the end of that year? After living in a big house like a little princess, she’d have to go back and face up to—what? It would have been utterly cruel.”

  Although Hudson’s concern for Veronique’s welfare seemed both characteristic and genuine, adopting a child in need certainly wouldn’t hurt his public image. If Rock had married to keep his career afloat (as some firmly believed), was it out of the realm of possibility that he would adopt a child to boost his sagging box office?

  Tom Clark, for one, believed that Hudson’s intentions were strictly honorable. After Darling Lili wrapped, Clark recalled that “Rock came home, still childless and unhappy because of it. He did donate a great deal of money to that orphanage and hoped that that enchanting little girl had something of a better life because of his largesse.”

  * * *

  “Rock and Rod Jo
in Forces” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times. Although Hudson and Rod McKuen had long discussed forming a production company together, the public announcement in January of 1970 finally made it official.

  Under the banner of R & R Productions, the two would collaborate on feature films. Rock would star. Rod would direct, adding yet another job title to McKuen’s seemingly endless list of hyphenates: poet-novelist-actor-singer-songwriter-record producer-gay rights pioneer. And movies were only the beginning. There would be television specials, a series of record albums, and a Broadway musical. Backed by McKuen, Rock Hudson would become a multimedia superstar, prepared to compete on the same playing field as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Elvis Presley. And with Rod McKuen’s genius for cross promotion, Rock would be merchandised into pop culture infinity.

  Even for a couple of overachieving workaholics, the plans sounded incredibly ambitious and many in the industry wondered if R & R Productions represented more than just a professional marriage. After all, their elaborate business plan virtually guaranteed that Hudson and McKuen would be together around the clock. And what had brought these two former Universal-International contract players together? The quick answer was Tom Clark, who was McKuen’s publicist at the time. The more complex explanation involved mutual need.

  A self-described “stringer of words,” McKuen had sold over three million books of poetry by the early 1970s. As a singer-songwriter, McKuen’s albums (Listen to the Warm, In Search of Eros) soared to the top of the charts and his gravelly voiced renditions of his own songs (“Jean,” “I’ve Been to Town”) were responsible for sold-out concerts around the world. Even if the critics had dubbed him the “King of Kitsch” and writer Nora Ephron had dismissed him as a “mush-huckster,” McKuen had managed to tap into the popular consciousness while connecting with the highly coveted youth market. And McKuen had a thirty-room mansion in Beverly Hills to prove it.