“San Fernando,” I answered proudly.
“Whatever,” Altman said. “Listen, when Don [Sutherland] asks you where you’re from, say, ‘I like to think of the Army as my home.’”
That, for me, was genius. That one line tells you that Hot Lips wasn’t offended by the obnoxious doctors because she was a nasty, cold-hearted wench; she was appalled because they were not only disrespecting the rules, but they were also disrespecting her home, ridiculing everything she held sacred. Bob got that across to me in just a few words, with no book learning required. Speaking of books, I didn’t learn to read until I was twelve.
Leon Erickson was a brilliant art director. I loved the way he worked my own personality into Hot Lips. When he was set dressing for my tent, he asked me, “Do you smoke?” I told him I didn’t. “Well, what would you have in your tent?” My answer was, of course, “Candy.” So he made sure to have a candy dish in there. It was also Leon who decided that I needed to wear garters. Bob loved the garters the moment he’d heard Leon mention them.
“Oh, garters!” he said. “Come with me . . .”
So we shot a scene of Hot Lips arriving at camp, exiting a helicopter, bending over and saluting—Hot Lips was always saluting. Chopper blades were whirring above my head as the updraft from the chopper blew up my skirt and showed off Leon’s precious garters.
Robert Duvall was a joy, so talented and a delight to work with—just an easy, breezy absolute doll. I had the privilege of making love to his hilariously pious Frank Burns, while screaming at him, “Kiss my hot lips!”—the inspiration for my character’s nickname. Tom Skerritt was a love and as enamored of Bob as I was. He was a dear—and another handsome fellow I got to romance on screen.
But my favorite castmate was the guy I spotted one day while waiting on the chow line. He was so darling, so androgynous looking that I had no idea what to make of him. The man was Bud Cort, who most people know from the cult classic Harold and Maude, had a small role in M*A*S*H as Private Boone. The first thing that popped into my head, looking at this fascinating creature in the mess tent, was, “Oh boy, we’re going to be best friends.” And we were. We still are.
For me the whole experience of making M*A*S*H was thrilling. But just as at real summer camp, there were mean kids. For me, the mean kids were the two male leads, as much as there are leads in Bob’s films: Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. They loved to pick on me.
Prior to filming, I didn’t know either one of them. Don had gotten some notice for his role in the Dirty Dozen, but at the time that was about it. Elliot had a little more buzz, having just appeared in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. I too had been offered a role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, but in one of my less-than-stellar career moves, I decided to pass. Why? Because I was an idiot.
The movie, exploring the very 1960s issue of spouse swapping, was a major hit. Boy, oh boy, did I have a crush on Elliott. Both Don and Elliott knew it. Throughout the shoot they kept themselves apart from the rest of the cast, which was perfect for their characters and the tight camaraderie they had in the film. But they were absolutely horrible to me.
Their favorite gag was to invite me out and then pretend that we’d never made plans. Don usually started it. He’d say, “Hey Sally, we were thinking of going to the movies tonight. Wanna come?”
“Sure!” I’d reply.
The end of the day would roll around, and I would see the two of them getting ready to leave the set. “Hey, Don, are we going to the movies?” I’d ask.
Don and Elliott would look at each other, confused. “No, I’m going to the game!” Don would say, and off they’d go, leaving me behind.
I fell for this more than once, I’m sorry to say.
We were almost two months into shooting when my thirty-second birthday rolled around. I was walking off set when the two of them drove up alongside me.
“Sally, it’s your birthday! Meet us at the Brown Derby,” they said.
“Just go away!” I told them. I’d learned my lesson by now.
“Oh, come on . . . It’s your birthday!”
So I gave in. I drove over to Beverly Hills, to the original Brown Derby restaurant at Beverly and Wilshire. The building itself was shaped just like an actual men’s brown derby hat. So sad they tore it down. Sometimes I think Los Angeles has no sense of its history. I took a seat in one of the booths and waited for what seemed like an hour. Alone in the dim light, I kept sitting there. I’d look at my watch. I’d look up at the door. I’d look at my watch again. Nothing. No one. I felt like a total idiot. They did it to me again, I thought. When would I ever learn?
Gathering the little self-respect I had left, I began to head for the door when I heard, “SURPRISE!”
Don and Elliott jumped out of the shadows. There they were, the two devils, chocolates in hand. Unbelievable. Even when they were doing something nice, they still had to torment me. Six months after the picture wrapped, we had a reunion lunch. We all kissed and made up, joking about how mean they were to me. I think I laughed. Maybe.
Because I didn’t mingle with the two of them, I didn’t know how disaffected they felt. Although I was an instant fan of Bob’s, Don and Elliott were not happy with the production. They even met with their agents to complain about Altman and discuss having him replaced; the two were concerned that Bob would not only ruin the movie but also their careers.
At the time Fox had two other war pictures in production—Tora Tora Tora starring Martin Balsam and Joseph Cotten among others, and Patton, starring George C. Scott. In a way this helped M*A*S*H, a third war picture, with its $3.5 million budget and unorthodox director, fly under the radar. The others were World War II movies. Although M*A*S*H was set in Korea, Bob worked hard to avoid references to the Korean War so that the film could just as readily evoke the current conflict in Vietnam.
But word was getting around—and it was obvious to anyone who saw the dailies—that the script was not being followed very closely. For some people, especially those of us coming from television, taking such liberties was amazing. In TV especially you didn’t change one word. When I had worked with Rod Steiger a few years before on an episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, we used to joke that we were worried we’d get canned for changing “a” to “the.”
The screenwriter Ring Lardner and lots of folks at Fox were increasingly bothered that people were improvising and, worse, constantly talking over each other. You just didn’t do that in movies then. Bob liked to have cameras and mics all over the place, always hot to pick up whatever we did or said. But Ingo Preminger, one of the producers, loved what he was seeing in the dailies. If Bob hinted that something hadn’t come out the way he wanted, Ingo would say, “So reshoot! I’m a happy man.”
If Bob knew about all the behind-the-scenes grumbling, he didn’t let on. He was so relaxed on the set. Few of us understood the kind of movie he was making, but he exuded confidence, no matter what. After shooting, we’d smoke a little grass, and some would have a drink. We’d all go to the dailies together. There was always a big crowd sitting there in the dark: actors, crew, agents, managers, and the occasional studio reps. The place was packed. If people hated what they saw, Bob didn’t seem to care, and if anyone had a good suggestion, he had no problem using it.
The first time I had ever seen dailies, for The Outer Limits, I’d been ready to hang myself. If I ever doubted that Bob understood me, he kept reminding me of it during the dailies for M*A*S*H. I would appear onscreen, and his voice would come out of the darkness.
“Oh, I bet you hate yourself there, Sally . . . I bet you think you’re looking ugly there . . .”
Then, one night, after the dailies were done and the drinks and the smokes were gone, Bob came up to me and said, “You know, you’re going to get nominated for an Academy Award for this.”
What do you say to something like that? I had no idea. I loved hearing that, especially from Bob, someone I loved and admired.
ON JUNE 11,1969, SHOOTING WAS CO
MPLETE. ROBERT ALTMAN brought M*A*S*H in three days ahead of schedule and nearly a half-a-million under budget. For directing the picture, he was paid a mere $75,000. Bob’s son Mike, who wrote the lyrics to M*A*S*H’s theme song, “Suicide Is Painless,” ended up making more money than Bob did on the picture.
But the war that had started on the set continued into the editing room. Bringing all of this footage together was going to be challenge; the studio didn’t even want to release the film at first because they didn’t know what to make of it.
In many ways M*A*S*H changed filmmaking. Bob brought a new fearlessness to the screen, a new juxtaposition of blood and gore with comedy and pathos. Horror movies always showed some carnage, which we have certainly taken to the max now, whether in slasher films or on cop shows. We show blood, livers, hearts pounding. But Bob was the first to depict gore in a realistic light, showing us the bloody hands of doctors working over an operating table while blithely talking about the game. Back then those scenes were scarier than a horror film’s because they were just too darn real.
M*A*S*H WENT ON TO BECOME A MEGAHIT, EVEN A CLASSIC. All the fears about its controversial nature had gone out the window. Two hours before a preview screening in San Francisco there were lines around the block to get in. Elliott and Don, who had wanted Bob fired, were just as thrilled as the rest of us. Elliott later worked with Bob in The Long Goodbye and, to this day, raves about him, as I do. But not everyone was happy with the movie’s outcome. The screenwriter, Ring Lardner, was furious the first time he saw the completed film.
“What have you done to my script?!” he supposedly demanded of Bob. “Not a word of what I wrote is in there!”
But in the end the $3.5 million production brought in more than $80 million at the box office and garnered countless award nominations, including five Oscar nods. One of them, as Bob had predicted, was for me.
M*A*S*H WAS THE GREATEST EXPERIENCE OF MY ENTIRE CAREER, and I’ve had a lot of great ones. Still, I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t push a button or two every time someone calls me Hot Lips. I’ve been working for more than fifty years and made at least fifty movies, but for better or worse, I’m most notably remembered as Hot Lips Houlihan. Recently, as I walked through New York City, a truck driver leaned out the window and yelled, “Hey, Hot Lips!” That put a big crooked smile on my face. Anything that keeps me connected to Bob Altman makes me happy.
Bob’s was a world most of us hadn’t seen—not in the movies, and certainly not on TV. But so much was to about to change—in Hollywood, in our culture, and in my own life.
CHAPTER 7
Never the Same Again
I WAS NOW WORKING ENOUGH TO BE COMFORTABLE FINANCIALLY and got my own place. No roommates—that was progress. I loved my new apartment on Shoreham Drive in West Hollywood, just above Sunset and Doheny. At the intersection of Sunset and Doheny was Turner’s Liquor Store, which was convenient when I wanted cookies and candy. The neighborhood was so peaceful, so beautiful, so sunny, and traffic-free.
But then the hippies arrived.
My beautiful white sidewalks were suddenly covered in gum. Kids, thousands it seemed, were all over Sunset Boulevard, with long hair and raggedy clothes, smoking joints on the street or wiped out on harder drugs.
Now my neighbors and I had to put up with the occasional ruckus in the parking lot below our building when it emptied after business hours. One night, when things got too loud, I strode out in my nightgown, having been awakened by crashing bottles and somebody threatening to cut somebody else. I’d had it. I stood up at the top of the wall that overlooked the lot, yelling, “Excuse me! But you’re on somebody else’s property and you’re breaking bottles. You roared in here on your motorcycles, looking like Hell’s Angels—and maybe you are! Now you’re screaming your heads off threatening to cut somebody? I mean, who do you think you are? Some of us need to sleep!”
All of a sudden, the tough guys got quiet. “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” someone said. “We’ll pick it up right away.” They immediately started cleaning up.
I had already called the cops, but when they arrived, I told them I’d solved the problem. Then I went back to bed.
It was a far cry from a dangerous neighborhood. Still, it was growing unfamiliar—more impersonal and less neighborly than the West Hollywood small town I had inhabited for a decade or so. Our enclave was coming to resemble a strange new America that we barely recognized. Early that summer of 1969 I had sprawled out on the bed of my friend Mark Rydell, who had directed me in Slattery’s People. I joined him and his former wife Joanne Linville to watch in awe as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Talk about brave new worlds!
The times were turbulent. We’d lost JFK in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated just a few months after King, at our own Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Vietnam was always in our thoughts. The war and the assassinations affected us greatly, and I think we all struggled to make sense of those horrors, feeling a loss of innocence and a troubling certainty that our world would never be the same.
But nothing could have prepared me for August 9, 1969, when horror struck closer to home.
I GOT THE CALL EARLY THAT SATURDAY MORNING. I WAS ALREADY awake when the phone rang. The voice on the line—a friend, I can’t remember who it was—sounded panicked, asking, “Is it true? Is it true?”
“Is what true?” I said.
“Is it true that Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring and everybody up at Rudi’s were stabbed and hung?”
“Of course not!” I yelled. “What’s wrong with you? Why would you even say something like that?!”
I hung up, feeling sick, and immediately called my friend Anjanette Comer. She confirmed the ghastly news: five people—Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steve Parent—had been murdered at the home of Stuart Cohen’s partner, my friend Rudi Altobelli. The housekeeper had found the bodies that morning. Anjanette came over to be with me, and we spent what seemed like the entire day huddled together, shivering and shaking and trying to grasp what had happened.
Rudi Altobelli and Stuart Cohen made a great management team. I was lucky to have them in my life. Stuart had the business head, and Rudi had the aesthetic sense, not to mention that he was endlessly fun and hospitable. He loved his dogs, loved having people over, and was a fantastic cook. Jack Nicholson always called him “Rudi the Rank” because of Rudi’s on-the-nose sarcasm.
Back in the early 1960s Stuart and Rudi had bought an expansive property in Benedict Canyon, overlooking all of Beverly Hills. Rudi lived in and ran the house. The place was somewhat secluded, shrouded by trees and shrubs. For years we’d all spent time hanging out there—me, Stuart, sometimes Luana, and occasionally Jack, who would come up to play cards along with Rudi’s many friends. The property included a main house and a detached guesthouse; it was beautiful but not overly fussy. Homey. It was the kind of place where you could put your bare feet up and relax.
The guesthouse was where we spent most of our time. It had a high, beamed ceiling and a large open living room, with a ladder that led up to a small loft. A large stone fireplace and a big dining room table anchored the living room. That was where Rudi would serve up his big pots of spaghetti to whoever had come around.
Walkways connected the separate areas of the property, bordered by split-rail fences and blooming plants. The property’s smallish pool sat between the main house and guesthouse. It had smooth curves and was hugged on all sides by rock and stone landscaping, softened with greenery. So inviting, so mellow.
We would go over and just sit around by the pool, maybe smoke some grass, then eat some spaghetti when the munchies kicked in. That made Stuart crazy—he hated when we smoked pot. He would get in a huff and storm off like he was leaving. We’d chase after him, pretending that we believed he was really stomping out, and we would beg him to stay, though we knew he always would.
Sun, food, friends, good times—that’s what the haven at 10050 Cielo Drive
had meant to us. Rudi would routinely rent out one or the other of the buildings on the property. Henry Fonda had lived in the guesthouse. Record producer Terry Melcher and his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen had lived in the main house. A strange musician named Charles Manson, who had been in touch with Terry about some recordings, had once come up to the house looking for him. But Terry and Candy weren’t staying there at the moment. Actress Sharon Tate and her friends were, while Sharon’s husband, the director Roman Polanski, was in London making a movie.
I didn’t know Roman and Sharon well, but I had gone to their wedding reception. Sharon was lovely, both in her look and her demeanor—very warm and sweet, approachable and kind. She was only twenty-six years old, due to deliver a baby two weeks from the night that Charles Manson’s followers invaded Rudi’s home.
Rudi, meanwhile, was working in Italy and hadn’t yet been informed of the tragedy. Stuart was also overseas, in Ireland with Chris Jones, an actor I’d introduced to him who had starred in the TV series The Legend of Jesse James. Someone had to break the news to Rudy. The task fell to me.
I reached Rudi at the Hassler Hotel in Rome and delivered the terrible blow. He immediately flew home, and I met him at the airport. From there we went straight to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where we spent the night together in a suite, scared to death, sick and brokenhearted.
Nothing so monstrous and violent had ever happened in our lives and certainly not in our community. The Tate murders and the LaBianca murders, committed a night later by Manson’s family members, were hideous, altering my consciousness and the consciousness of everyone I knew. Our world had come unhinged.
I thought about the way I’d lived at my old apartment on Sweetzer, not far from my current place on Shoreham. Every night I’d leave my door open a crack so that the cat could go in and out. Not just unlocked—open. I still slept like a log every night, without a care in the world. That was a Hollywood that didn’t exist anymore.
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